THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC: CHAPTER 2
ITS
CONSTITUTION TENDENCIES AND DESTINY
Orestes A. Brownson LL. D
TABLE OF CONTENTS
GOVERNMENT
Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself.
He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God.
He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence only by communion with
God, through which he participates of the divine being and life. He
communes with God through the divine creative act and the Incarnation
of the Word, through his kind, and through the material world.
Communion with God through Creation and Incarnation is religion,
distinctively taken, which binds man to God as his first cause, and
carries him onward to God as his final cause; communion through the
material world is expressed by the word property; and communion with
God through humanity is society. Religion, society, property, are the
three terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the
essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and
his perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the attainment of
the end for which he is created.
Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through his
kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, to actualize
the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to his beatitude, since
humanity is neither God nor the material universe, it is yet a
necessary and essential condition of his life, his progress, and the
completion of his existence. He is born and lives in society, and can
be born and live nowhere else. It is one of the necessities of his
nature. "God saw that it was not good for man to be alone." Hence,
wherever man is found he is found in society, living in more or less
strict intercourse with his kind.
But society never does and never can exist without government of some
sort. As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is government a
necessity of society. The simplest form of society is the family—Adam
and Eve. But though Adam and Eve are in many respects equal, and have
equally important though different parts assigned them, one or the
other must be head and governor, or they cannot form the society called
family. They would be simply two individuals of different sexes, and
the family would fail for the want of unity.
Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some degree of
family government, of some authority to direct, control, restrain, or
prescribe. Hence the authority of the husband and father is recognized
by the common consent of mankind. Still more apparent is the necessity
of government the moment the family develops and grows into the tribe,
and the tribe into the nation. Hence no nation exists without
government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or degraded,
that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the elders, or in the
tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint reminiscences of some sort
of government, with authority to demand obedience and to punish the
refractory. Hence, as man is nowhere found out of society, so nowhere
is society found without government.
Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that its
necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the fact that the
human race by sin has fallen from its primitive integrity, or original
righteousness. The fall asserted by Christian theology, though often
misinterpreted, and its effects underrated or exaggerated, is a fact
too sadly confirmed by individual experience and universal history; but
it is not the cause why government is necessary, though it may be an
additional reason for demanding it. Government would have been
necessary if man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well
as for the bad. The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man
retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his nature. It
exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven in its perfection.
Its office is not purely repressive, to restrain violence, to redress
wrongs, and to punish the transgressor. It has something more to do
than to restrict our natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain
justice between man and man. Its office is positive as well as
negative. It is needed to render effective the solidarity of the
individuals of a nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a
mere organization—to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen
all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all—to
develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and
direct it to the promotion of the common weal—to be a social
providence, imitating in its order and degree the action of the divine
providence itself, and, while it provides for the common good of all,
to protect each, the lowest and meanest, with the whole force and
majesty of society. It is the minister of wrath to wrong-doers, indeed,
but its nature is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the
right of property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can
exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science and
art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful means to the
fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his existence. Next after
religion, it is man's greatest good; and even religion without it can
do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call it a
necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted,
hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved,
respected, obeyed, and if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly
goods, and even of life itself.
The nature or essence of government is to govern. A government that
does not govern, is simply no government at all. If it has not the
ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument
in the bands of individuals for advancing their private interests, but
it is not government. To be government it must govern both individuals
and the community. If it is a mere machine for making prevail the will
of one man, of a certain number of men, or even of the community, it
may be very effective sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest
for evil, but government in the proper sense of the word it is not. To
govern is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and
directs his ship. It necessarily implies two terms, governor and
governed, and a real distinction between them. The denial of all real
distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics
analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real
distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which
all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism—the supreme
sophism. If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface
both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that
governs is identically the will that is governed. To make the
controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all
control. There must, then, if there is government at all, be a power,
force, or will that governs, distinct from that which is governed. In
those governments in which it is held that the people govern, the
people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the people
governed, or there is no real government.
Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right
or authority to govern. Power without right is not government.
Governments have the right to use force at need, but might does not
make right, and not every power wielding the physical force of a nation
is to be regarded as its rightful government. Whatever resort to
physical force it may be obliged to make, either in defence of its
authority or of the rights of the nation, the government itself lies in
the moral order, and politics is simply a branch of ethics—that branch
which treats of the rights and duties of men in their public relations,
as distinguished from their rights and duties in their private
relations.
Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the
right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere
physical necessity. The right to govern and the duty to obey are
correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived without the
other. Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable sentiment but a duty, a
moral virtue. Treason is not merely a difference in political opinion
with the governing authority, but a crime against the sovereign, and a
moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, the Founder of the moral Law.
Treason, if committed in other Countries, unhappily, has been more
frequently termed by our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor
than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human
governments have authority to punish. The American people have been
chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the
correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law,
and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority,
however constituted or wherever lodged. It is as necessary, as much a
duty, as much a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler
examples of the most devoted loyalty are not found in the world's
history than were exhibited in the ancient Greek and Roman republics,
or than have been exhibited by both men and women in the young republic
of the United States. Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most
generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime
love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment
of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice,
and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike.
There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly
loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal,
criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.
Such a people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind. It
mocks at duty, scorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no
person, no thing, human or divine, sacred or inviolable. The assertion
of government as lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and
reconciles it with authority. Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever
one pleases that authority permits or does not forbid. Freedom to
follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any civil
restraint, is license, not liberty. There is no lesion to liberty in
repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of the
authority that has the right to command. Tyranny or oppression is not
in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped
authority—to a power that has no right to command, or that commands
what exceeds its right or its authority. To say that it is contrary to
liberty to be forced to forego our own will or inclination in any case
whatever, is simply denying the right of all government, and falling
into no-governmentism. Liberty is violated only when we are required
to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to
make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority
has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a
rightful command. The requisition, if made by rightful authority,
then, violates no right that we have or can have, and where there is no
violation of our rights there is no violation of our liberty. The
moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of obedience,
presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may meet in
peace and operate to the same end.
This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience,
and that the resistance to power can never be lawful. The tyrant may be
lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of the word itself, is a
usurper, and without authority. Abuses of power may be resisted even
by force when they become too great to be endured, when there is no
legal or regular way of redressing them, and when there is a reasonable
prospect that resistance will prove effectual and substitute something
better in their place. But it is never lawful to resist the rightful
sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be said
to abuse it. Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a
power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no
abuse or abuses to redress. All turns, then, on the right of power, or
its legitimacy. Whence does government derive its right to govern?
What is the origin and ground of sovereignty? This question is
fundamental and without a true answer to it politics cannot be a
science, and there can be no scientific statesmanship. Whence, then,
comes the sovereign right to govern?
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