THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC: CHAPTER 3
ITS
CONSTITUTION TENDENCIES AND DESTINY
Orestes A. Brownson LL. D
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
Government is both a fact and a right. Its origin as a fact, is simply
a question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is
a question of ethics. Whether a certain territory and its population
are a sovereign state or nation, or not—whether the actual ruler of a
country is its rightful ruler, or not—is to be determined by the
historical facts in the case; but whence the government derives its
right to govern, is a question that can be solved only by philosophy,
or, philosophy failing, only by revelation.
Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and
the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of
government, among which may be named—
I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his child.
II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are
sovereign.
IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of
God;—
VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual
society;—
VII. From God through the people;—
VIII. From God through the natural law.
I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin
of government as a fact. The patriarchal system is the earliest known
system of government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly
all known governments—in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the
Irish septs and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman
qentes, and the Russian and Hindoo villages. The right of the father
was held to be his right to govern his family or household, which, with
his children, included his wife and servants. From the family to the
tribe the transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the
nation. The father is chief of the family; the chief of the eldest
family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest tribe becomes
chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch. The heads of
families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, and the families
themselves, represented by their delegates, or publicly assembling for
public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three forms, with their
several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and
mixed governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and have
generally been held to be all that are possible.
Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from
the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family.
Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal,
which seem to be founded on landed property, may be traced back to a
patriarchal origin. The patriarch is sole proprietor, and the
possessions of the family are vested in him, and he governs as
proprietor as well as father. In the tribe, the chief is the
proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and holds the
domain. Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the
suzerain, holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or
vacant. All the great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold
the domain and govern as proprietors; they have the authority of the
father and the owner; and their subjects, though theoretically their
children, are really their slaves.
In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
transformation. The father retains all the power of the patriarch
within his family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of
it, is met and controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are
united in the senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state.
Yet, not all the heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the
tenants of the sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed
and marked by the god Terminus. Hence the great plebeian houses, often
richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all share in
the government and the honors of the state, because they were not
tenants of any portion of the sacred territory. There is here the
introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state,
and founds the civil order, or what is now called civilization. The
city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, and
territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.
In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the
land. When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early
times was to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took
possession of him, received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only
such persons as were taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the
sacred territory or domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens
with full political rights. This, in modern language, means that the
state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
the state, not the state to the citizen. Under the patriarchal, the
tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly
speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical
rather than political. Authority—even the nation itself—is personal,
not territorial. The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king,
is the only proprietor. Under the Graeco-Roman system all this is
transformed. The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the
real proprietor is the city or state. Under the Empire, no doubt, what
lawyers call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as
the representative and trustee of the city or state.
When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
history does not inform us. The first-born of Adam, we are told, built
a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence
that it was constituted a municipality. The earliest traces of the
civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and
its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as
well as republican. It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal
system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion
rather than by simple explication. It has in it an element that, if it
exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a
different form, and the transformation marks the passage from the
economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil
constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from
civitas—city or state. The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and
nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished
from the state, barbarians. The origin of the word barbarian,
barbarus, or [Greek] barbaros, is unknown, and its primary sense can
be only conjectured. Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild,
fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks
and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the
term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of
manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and
sciences—the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.
They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an
aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in
which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was
personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right,
not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.
Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European sense, but
to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedaemon had kings; yet
it was no less republican than Athens; and Rome was called and was a
republic under the emperors no less than under the consuls. Republic,
respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or,
in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on
personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory,
or domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
attaches the nation to a certain definite territory. France, Spain,
Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in substance
though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the word,
republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own
private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of
the state. The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution
of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal
or private right. Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to
barbarism, and all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian
in Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern tiles to breeding
or refinement of manners, simply because these are characteristics of a
republican, or polished [from [Greek] polis, city] people. Every
people that has a real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity,
is a republican people; and hence the church and her great doctors when
they speak of the state as distinguished from the church, call it the
republic, as may be seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius
IX., which some have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is
developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded
by all Christendom. In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is
transformed into that of the city or state, that is, of the republic;
but in all barbarous nations it retains its Private and personal
character. The nation is only the family or tribe, and is called by
the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical
denomination. Race has not been supplanted by country; they are a
people, not a state. They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may
find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never
find among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern
Christian nations. They have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no
patria, or country. The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire,
whether of the West or the East, were nations, or confederacies of
nations, but not states. The nation with them was personal, not
territorial. Their country was wherever they fed their flocks and
herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night. There were
Germans, but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his
"father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken. The Polish,
Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by
German states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue,
are excluded from the Germanic Confederation. The Turks, or Osmanlis,
are a race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or
predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern
Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no
state, no country. The nation defines the boundaries, not the
boundaries the nation. The nation does not belong to the territory,
but the territory to the nation or its chief. The Irish and
Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
indivisible, they still held it as private property. The shah of
Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the
landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants. They hold
it from him, not from the Persian state.
The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain
of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan. There is in barbaric states
no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being
tempered by parental affection. The chief is a despot, and rules with
the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.
He owns the land and his subjects.
Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the
Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
constitution. The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all,
governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the
commonwealth. Under feudalism there are estates, but no state. The
king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate,
and the commons are represented as an estate. The whole theory of
power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.
It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized
nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
ages.
It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats,
especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and
Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and
anti-republican. The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that
power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that
the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by
virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism. This says nothing in
favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal
suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
theoretically or practically. Property has of itself advantages
enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights
and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as
the business classes. The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage,
or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis
Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation
to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter
the revolution of 1848. The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
private or personal right. It is not a private, but a political right,
and, like all political rights, a public trust. Extremes meet, and
thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in
principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their
place with nations on whom the light of civilization has never yet
dawned. All is not gold that glisters.
The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is,
that it makes it a public trust. Barbarism knows only persons;
civilization asserts and maintains the state. With barbarians the
authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication;
in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation. Keeping
in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of
government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the
patriarchal. The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
patriarchal that the human race has begun its career. The family or
household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as
the initial or inchoate nation. But its simple direct development
gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which
nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan
and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order is
republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or despotic
nation, and must either find or create civilization, which has been
developed from the patriarchal system by way of transformation.
But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of government,
and all governments have been developed or modified from it, the right
of government to govern cannot be deduced from the right of the father
to govern his children, for the parental right itself is not ultimate
or complete. All governments that assume it to be so, and rest on it
as the foundation of their authority, are barbaric or despotic, and,
therefore, without any legitimate authority. The right to govern rests
on ownership or dominion. Where there is no proprietorship, there is
no dominion; and where there is no dominion, there is no right to
govern. Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation. The maker has the
right to the thing made. He, so far as he is sole creator, is sole
proprietor, and may do what he will with it. God is sovereign lord and
proprietor of the universe because He is its sole creator. He hath the
absolute dominion, because He is absolute maker. He has made it, He
owns it; and one may do what he will with his own. His dominion is
absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He rightly governs as
absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises
only His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be
right, wise, just, and good. The despot is a man attempting to be God
upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power. Despotism is based on,
the parental right, and the parental right is assumed to be absolute.
Hence, your despotic rulers claim to reign, and to be loved and
worshipped as gods. Even the Roman emperors, in the fourth and fifth
centuries, were addressed as divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a
Christian, was addressed as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras—so far
did barbarism encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for he is
the generator, not the creator of his child. Generation is in the
order of second causes, and is simply the development or explication of
the race. The early Roman law, founded on the confusion of generation
with creation, gave the father absolute authority over the child—the
right of life and death, as over his servants or slaves; but this was
restricted under the Empire, and in all Christian nations the authority
of the father is treated, like all power, as a trust. The child, like
the father himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father
is answerable for the use he makes of his authority. The law fixes the
age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; and even
during his nonage, takes him from the father and places him under
guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly
abuses his trust. This is proper, because society contributes to the
life of the child, and has a right as well as an interest in him.
Society, again, must suffer if the child is allowed to grow up a
worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a right to intervene, both in
behalf of itself and of the child, in case his parents neglect to train
him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or are training him
up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the
community. How, then, base the right of society on the right of the
father, since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to
the right of the parent?
But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the ground
of the right of society to govern. Assume the parental right to be
perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, it is no right to
govern where no such relation exists. Nothing true, real, solid in
government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a "sham." The
statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms to the
realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts
legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable. The presumptions or
assumptions of law or politics must have a real and solid basis, or
they are inadmissible. How, from the right of the father to govern his
own child, born from his loins, conclude his right to govern one not
his child? Or how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the
right of society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
political authority over its members?
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