Besides, in point of fact, they are rights which are practically valid for you only in the will of the sovereign. Whether they are in their nature primordial or prescriptive rights, makes no difference as to this point. The will of the sovereign is the only effectual guarantee of the natural rights of individuals, and the only source of their political rights. The sovereign recognizes the former, confers the latter, and secures both. There is not a particle of political right or power possessed or exercised by any individual in the nation which is not derived by grant from the sovereign power. A certain number of individuals in the nation have, for instance, the right of voting at the primary elections and for the determination of certain questions submitted to a popular vote. This is a delegated right, granted only to a certain number of individuals, not as sovereigns or parcel sovereigns, but as subjects of the state, acting, for certain definite purposes, and within certain prescribed limits, as agents of the sovereign power.
So with all other political powers exercised in the nation—whether legislative, judicial, or executive; whether exercised by individuals or by constituted bodies: all stand in the will of the sovereign power; all are derived and delegated powers—ministerial, and not imperial.
It is easy now to see the pernicious influence which your doctrine about the sovereign rights of individuals must have upon the unreflecting masses who accept it as sound sense, and particularly upon those of them who vote at the primary elections.
In the first place, it generates a false and practically mischievous notion of their relation to the other constituted authorities of the state. You are yourself an example in point.
You ask whether it is a mistake or an exaggeration in you to 'say that presidents, and governors, and all the departments of State or Federal machinery, are all subordinate to the people?'
It is certainly neither a mistake nor an exaggeration to say so, provided by the people you understand the whole people, in their sovereign capacity as one body politic. But it is an egregious mistake, an absurd and mischievous falsehood, to say so, if by the people be understood those who vote in the primary elections—whether the concurring majority of them or all of them. The people who vote are not the sovereign people. In their capacity of voters they are—in common with all the other functionaries of the Government—coördinate parts of the indivisible organism of the State. The legislative, judicial, and executive functionaries of the Government—constituted directly or indirectly through the ministerial agency of their votes—when thus constituted, hold their powers not from the voters, but through them from the sovereign; and to that sovereign alone are they responsible for the exercise of them. They are, therefore, not 'subordinate' to the voters, either in the sense of deriving their powers from them, or in the sense of being accountable to them, and there is no other sense of the term that is not futile here. They are subordinate in both these respects to the sovereign power of the nation; but so, too, are the voters themselves; and the former no more than the latter.
But those who accept your instructions are not likely so to understand this. They are not likely to be wiser than their teachers, and cannot perhaps be so safely trusted with the dangerous edge tools of false doctrine. You tell them that all Government officials, in all departments, are subordinate to the sovereign people; and they are sure to understand it that they, the voters, are the sovereign people, and that all the constituted authorities are subordinate to them in point of power—hold their powers from them alone, and are responsible to them alone—while they themselves hold their powers from themselves, and are responsible only to themselves. Hence (and you yourself have in this speech set them the example) we hear them talking of themselves as the 'masters,' and Government officials as their 'servants,' just as though both alike were not servants of one and the same sovereign master, whose right and power it is—within the sphere of the state, and for the just ends of the state—to control every individual in the nation. There is a world of mischief in the use of such words among the ignorant and unreflecting, and demagogues well know how to avail themselves of the power it gives them.
The pernicious tendency of your doctrine about the sovereign power and sovereign rights of individuals is seen in another and more general point of view.
Political sovereignty—residing, as we have seen it does, in the whole people as the state, or as one body politic—is not an absolute sovereignty. It is limited to the just ends of the state—the maintenance of social justice and the general security and welfare. There is no sovereignty to do wrong. The state is so far a moral person that its sovereignty cannot rightfully be exercised from mere will, arbitrary caprice, or passion; but only dutifully, in just ways, and for its proper ends.