THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC: CHAPTER 7
ITS
CONSTITUTION TENDENCIES AND DESTINY
Orestes A. Brownson LL. D
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT
The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation,
and the constitution of the government. The constitution of the
government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the
constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its
origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through
historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the
other in historical fact. The nation must exist, and exist as a
political community, before it can give itself a constitution; and no
state, any more than an individual, can exist without a constitution of
some sort.
The distinction between the providential constitution of the people and
the constitution of the government, is not always made. The
illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers
who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in
his work on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions,
maintains that constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all
human agency from their formation and growth. Disgusted with French
Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much,
and deeply wedded to monarchy in both church and state, he had the
temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal families for the
government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a
good government without a king who has descended from one of those
divinely created royal families. It was with some such thought, most
likely, that a French journalist, writing home from the United States,
congratulated the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army,
so that when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to
do, they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
emperor. Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the
descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the
French, a decided parvenu. Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a
parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no
peer among any of the descendants of the old royal families of Europe.
There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that constitutions
are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once.
But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its constitution
by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done
so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse. If the
constitution once given is fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly
divine, and contain no human element, and the people have and can have
no hand in their own government—the fundamental objection to the
theocratic constitution of society. To assume it is to transfer to
civil society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or supernatural
providence, and to maintain that the divine sovereignty governs in
civil society immediately and supernaturally, as in the spiritual
society. But such is not the fact. God governs the nation by the
nation itself, through its own reason and free-will. De Maistre is
right only as to the constitution the nation starts with, and as to the
control which that constitution necessarily exerts over the
constitutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.
The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential
constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a convention
of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the only constitution,
both of the people and the government. Prior to its adoption there is
no government, no state, no political community or authority.
Antecedently to it the people are an inorganic mass, simply
individuals, without any political or national solidarity. These
individuals, they suppose, come together in their own native right and
might, organize themselves into a political community, give themselves
a constitution, and draw up and vote rules for their government, as a
number of individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve
themselves into a temperance society or a debating club. This might do
very well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating
club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join or not
as they please, and which they are bound to obey no farther and no
longer than suits their convenience. But the state is a power, a
sovereignty; speaks to all within its jurisdiction with an imperative
voice; commands, and may use physical force to compel obedience, when
not voluntarily yielded. Men are born its subjects, and no one can
withdraw from it without its express or tacit permission, unless for
causes that would justify resistance to its authority. The right of
subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a
tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and
warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the
right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and
authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to
the state, and is bound to it.
The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a
territory or country under one political head is a truth; but "the
solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or political
authority of their respective countries, so eloquently preached a few
years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only a falsehood, but a
falsehood destructive of all government and of all political
organization. Kossuth's doctrine supposes the people, or the
populations of all countries, are, irrespective of their governments,
bound together in solido, each for all and all for each, and therefore
not only free, but bound, wherever they find a population struggling
nominally for liberty against its government, to rush with arms in
their hands to its assistance—a doctrine clearly incompatible with any
recognition of political authority or territorial rights. Peoples or
nations commune with each other only through the national authorities,
and when the state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its
subjects are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention
on either side. There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, more
or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of the
populations with and through their governments, not without them.
Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals of one and
the same nation. These are all bound together, all for each and each
for all. The individual is born into society and under the government,
and without the authority of the government, which represents all and
each, he cannot release himself from his obligations. The state is
then by no means a voluntary association. Every one born or adopted
into it is bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from
it, unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no
protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for his
rights of conscience. This is Vattel's doctrine, and the dictate of
common sense.
The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation for
itself is a law—the organic or fundamental law, if you will, but a
law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power. That sovereign
power must exist before it can act, and it cannot exist, if vested in
the people or nation, without a constitution, or without some sort of
political organization of the people or nation. There must, then, be
for every state or nation a constitution anterior to the constitution
which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives itself
derives all its vitality and legal force.
Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, for
creation and providence are simply the expression of the Supreme Logic,
the Logos, by whom all things are made. Nations have originated in
various ways, but history records no instance of a nation existing as
an inorganic mass organizing itself into a political community. Every
nation, at its first appearance above the horizon, is found to have an
organization of some sort. This is evident from the only ways in which
history shows us nations originating. These ways are: 1. The union of
families in the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The
migration of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.
4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial,
religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt, separation,
and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling of the conquerors
and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a new people. These are all
the ways known to history, and in none of these ways does a people,
absolutely destitute of all organization, constitute itself a state,
and institute and carry on civil government.
The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet incipient
states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a
centre of social life of their own. The families and tribes that
migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and
tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time. The Celtic tribes
retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar
Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and
in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth. It subsists still in
the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or
Kabyles of Africa.
Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, at
least under, the authority of the mother country, whose political
constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry with them. They
receive from the parent state a political organization, which, though
subordinate, yet constitutes them embryonic states, with a unity,
individuality, and centre of public life in themselves, and which, when
they are detached and recognized as independent, render them complete
states. War and conquest effect great national changes, but do not,
strictly speaking, create new states. They simply extend and
consolidate the power of the conquering state.
Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but only
when they have previously existed as such, and have retained the
tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when the
administration has erected them into real though dependent political
communities. A portion of the people of a state not so erected or
organized, that has in no sense had a distinct political existence of
its own, has never separated from the national body and formed a new
and independent nation. It cannot revolt; it may rise up against the
government, and either revolutionize and take possession of the state,
or be put down by the government as an insurrection. The amalgamation
of the conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies
the institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation or
political community. The English of to-day are very different from
both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time of Richard
Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or political
community. England is still England.
The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been cut up
into several separate and independent nations, but because its several
provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman arms, been
independent nations or tribes, and more especially because the
conquerors themselves were divided into several distinct nations or
confederacies. If the barbarians had been united in a single nation or
state, the Roman empire most likely would have changed masters, indeed,
but have retained its unity and its constitution, for the Germanic
nations that finally seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to
destroy its name or nationality, for they were themselves more than
half Romanized before conquering Rome. But the new nations into which
the empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without
political or governmental organization, continued from the constitution
of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or less by what was
retained from the empire.
It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be altered,
or that every people starts with a constitution fully developed, as
would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre. The constitution of the
family is rather economical than political, and the tribe is far from
being a fully developed state. Strictly speaking, the state, the modern
equivalent for the city of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed
till men began to build and live in cities, and became fixed to a
national territory. But in the first place, the eldest born of the
human race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find
traces of the family and tribal organization long after their municipal
existence—in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, and in Rome down
to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the second place, the
pastoral nations, though they have not precisely the city or state
organization, yet have a national organization, and obey a national
authority. Strictly speaking, no pastoral nation has a civil or
political constitution, but they have what in our modern tongues can be
expressed by no other term. The feudal regime, which was in full vigor
even in Europe from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century,
had nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper;
yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, though
a very imperfect one?
The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the early
ages. For a long time the national organizations bore unmistakable
traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from
the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.
Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same
organization. Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and
disused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural
generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations,
it was the same. At first the father was both priest and king, an when
the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have
seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had
the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and
integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient
nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms
to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark,
followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the
Graeco-Roman civilization. The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less
a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than
the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in
faith and worship. In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary
descent, but every thing is by election of grace. The Christian
dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior
to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural
generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of
Christendom. No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and,
indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to
have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He
came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive
him.
The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the nation
is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and
efficient constitution of the state. It is the source of the vitality
of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines
its destiny. The constitution which a nation is said to give itself,
is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the
state for the government instituted under it. Thomas Paine would admit
nothing to be the constitution but a written document which he could
fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole. The Abbe
Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was
ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than
that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.
Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly
as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with
the constitution itself. No constitution can be written on paper or
engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up,
and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is
extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it—is, at best,
legislative instead of constitutive. The famous Magna Charta drawn up
by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons
at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date
of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but
a set of restrictions on power. The constitution is the intrinsic or
inherent and actual constitution of the people or political community
itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it
from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one
another.
The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and
established in accordance with any preconceived theory. What is
theoretic in a constitution is unreal. The constitutions conceived by
philosophers in their closets are constitutions only of Utopia or
Dreamland. This world is not governed by abstractions, for
abstractions are nullities. Only the concrete is real, and only the
real or actual has vitality or force. The French people adopted
constitution after constitution of the most approved pattern, and amid
bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and
thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as
enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had
no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no
element of its life. The English are great constitution-mongers—for
other nations. They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own
will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into
trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it
only an embarrassment or encumbrance. The doctor might as well attempt
to give an individual a new constitution, or the constitution of
another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other constitution
than that which it has, and with which it is born.
The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves
this thesis. The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the
nations founded on the site of the empire, a double constitution—the
barbaric and the civil—the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the
Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East. The key to all
modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two constitutions
and the interests respectively associated with them, which created two
societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same
national denomination. The barbaric was the constitution of the
conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and
fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of
barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to
a very great extent into harmony with itself. The Pope became a feudal
sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.
Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman
constitution got the upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far
as it could not be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated. The
original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its
constitution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any
of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
The same process is going on in the East, though it has not advanced so
far, having begun there several centuries later, and the Graeco-Roman
constitution was far feebler there than in the West at the epoch of the
conquest. The Germanic tribes that conquered the West had long had
close relations with the empire, had served as its allies, and even in
its armies, and were partially Romanized. Most of their chiefs had
received a Roman culture; and their early conversion to the Christian
faith facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
constitution. In the East it was different. The conquerors had no
touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet, they were
animated with an intense hatred, which, after the conquest, was changed
into a superb contempt, of Christians and Romans. They had their civil
constitution in the Koran; and the Koran, in its principles, doctrines,
and spirit, is exclusive and profoundly intolerant. The Graeco-Roman
constitution was always much weaker in the East, and had far greater
obstacles to overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the
shock of the conquest. Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of
the East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily receiving
rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying outside of the
boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able to sustain itself.
The Greek or Christian populations of the empire are no longer in
danger of being exterminated or absorbed by the Mohammedan state or
population. They are the only living and progressive people of the
Ottoman Empire, and their complete success in absorbing or expelling
the Turk is only a question of time. They will, in all present
probability, reestablish a Christian and Roman East in much less time
from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the
fall of Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric
constitution founded by its Germanic invaders.
Indeed, the Roman constitution, laws, and civilization not only gain
the mastery in the nations seated within the limits of the old Roman
Empire, but extend their power through out the whole civilized world.
The Graeco-Roman civilization is, in fact, the only civilization now
recognized, and nations are accounted civilized only in proportion as
they are Romanized and Christianized. The Roman law, as found in the
Institutes, Pandects, and Novellae of Justinian, or the Corpus Legis
Civilis, is the basis of the law and jurisprudence of all Christendom.
The Graeco-Roman civilization, called not improperly Christian
civilization, is the only progressive civilization. The old feudal
system remains in England little more than an empty name. The king is
only the first magistrate of the kingdom, and the House of Lords is
only an hereditary senate. Austria is hard at work in the Roman
direction, and finds her chief obstacle to success in Hungary, with the
Magyars whose feudalism retains almost the full vigor of the Middle
Ages. Russia is moving in the same direction; and Prussia and the
smaller Germanic states obey the same impulse. Indeed, Rome has
survived the conquest—has conquered her conquerors, and now invades
every region from which they came. The Roman Empire may be said to be
acknowledged and obeyed in lands lying far beyond the farthest limits
reached by the Roman eagles, and to be more truly the mistress of the
world than under Augustus, Trajan, or the Antonines. Nothing can stand
before the Christian and Romanized nations, and all pagandom and
Mohammedom combined are too weak to resist their onward march.
All modern European revolutions result only in reviving the Roman
Empire, whatever the motives, interests, passions, or theories that
initiate them. The French Revolution of the last century and that of
the present prove it. France, let people say what they will, stands at
the head of the European civilized world, and displays en grand all its
good and all its bad tendencies. When she moves, Europe moves; when she
has a vertigo, all European nations are dizzy; when she recovers her
health, her equilibrium, and good sense, others become sedate, steady,
and reasonable. She is the head, nay, rather, the heart of
Christendom—the head is at Rome—through which circulates the pure and
impure blood of the nations. It is in vain Great Britain, Germany, or
Russia disputes with her the hegemony of European civilization. They
are forced to yield to her at last, to be content to revolve around her
as the centre of the political system that masters them. The reason
is, France is more completely and sincerely Roman than any other
nation. The revolutions that have shaken the world have resulted in
eliminating the barbaric elements she had retained, and clearing away
all obstacles to the complete triumph of Imperial Rome. Napoleon III.
is for France what Augustus was for Rome. The revolutions in Spain and
Italy have only swept away the relics of the barbaric constitution, and
aided the revival of Roman imperialism. In no country do the
revolutionists succeed in establishing their own theories; Caesar
remains master of the field. Even in the United States, a revolution
undertaken in favor of the barbaric system has resulted in the
destruction of what remained of that system—in sweeping away the last
relics of disintegrating feudalism, and in the complete establishment
of the Graeco-Roman system, with important improvements, in the New
World.
The Roman system is republican, in the broad sense of the term, because
under it power is never an estate, never the private for the public
good. As it existed under the Caesars, and is revived in modern times,
whether under the imperial or the democratic form, it, no doubt, tends
to centralism, to the concentration of all the powers and forces of the
state in one central government, from which all local authorities and
institutions emanate. Wise men oppose it as affording no guaranties to
individual liberty against the abuses of power. This it may not do, but
the remedy is not in feudalism. The feudal lord holds his authority as
an estate, and has over the people under him all the power of Caesar
and all the rights of the proprietor. He, indeed, has a guaranty
against his liege-lord, sometimes a more effective guaranty than his
liege-lord has against him; but against his centralized power his
vassals and serfs have only the guaranty that a slave has against his
owner.
Feudalism is alike hostile to the freedom of public authority and of
the people. It is essentially a disintegrating element in the nation.
It breaks the unity and individuality of the state, embarrasses the
sovereign, and guards against the abuse of public authority by
overpowering and suppressing it. Every feudal lord is a more thorough
despot in his own domain than Caesar ever was or could be in the
empire; and the monarch, even if strong enough, is yet not competent to
intervene between him and his people, any more than the General
government in the United States was to intervene between the negro
slave and his master. The great vassals of the crown singly, or, if
not singly, in combination—and they could always combine in the
interest of their order—were too strong for the king, or to be brought
under any public authority, and could issue from their fortified
castles and rob and plunder to their hearts' content, with none to call
them to an account. Under the most thoroughly centralized government
there is far more liberty for the people, and a far greater security
for person and property, except in the case of the feudal nobles
themselves, than was even dreamed of while the feudal regime was in
full vigor. Nobles were themselves free, it is conceded, but not the
people. The king was too weak, too restricted in his action by the
feudal constitution to reach them, and the higher clergy were ex
officio sovereigns, princes, barons, or feudal lords, and were led by
their private interests to act with the feudal nobility, save when that
nobility threatened the temporalities of the church. The only reliance,
under God, left in feudal times to the poor people was in the lower
ranks of the clergy, especially of the regular clergy. All the great
German emperors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who saw the
evils of feudalism, and attempted to break it up and revive imperial
Rome, became involved in quarrels with the chiefs of the religious
society, and failed, because the interest of the Popes, as feudal
sovereigns and Italian princes, and the interests of the dignified
clergy, were for the time bound up with the feudal society, though
their Roman culture and civilization made them at heart hostile to it.
The student of history, however strong his filial affection towards the
visible head of the church, cannot help admiring the grandeur of the
political views of Frederic the Second, the greatest and last of the
Hohenstaufen, or refrain from dropping a tear over his sad failure. He
had great faults as a man, but he had rare genius as a statesman; and
it is some consolation to know that he died a Christian death, in
charity with all men, after having received the last sacraments of his
religion.
The Popes, under the circumstances, were no doubt justified in the
policy they pursued, for the Swabian emperors failed to respect the
acknowledged rights of the church, and to remember their own
incompetency in spirituals; but evidently their political views and
aims were liberal, far-reaching, and worthy of admiration. Their
success, if it could have been effected without lesion to the church,
would have set Europe forward some two or three hundred years, and
probably saved it from the schisms of the fourteenth and sixteenth
centuries. But it is easy to be wise after the event. The fact is,
that during the period when feudalism was in full vigor, the king was
merely a shadow; the people found their only consolation in religion,
and their chief protectors in the monks, who mingled with them, saw
their sufferings, and sympathized with them, consoled them, carried
their cause to the castle before the feudal lord and lady, and did,
thank God, do something to keep alive religious sentiments and
convictions in the bosom of the feudal society itself. Whatever
opinions may be formed of the monastic orders in relation to the
present, this much is certain, that they were the chief civilizers of
Europe, and the chief agents in delivering European society from feudal
barbarism.
The aristocracy have been claimed as the natural allies of the throne,
but history proves them to be its natural enemies, whenever it cannot
be used in their service, and kings do not consent to be their
ministers and to do their bidding. A political aristocracy has at
heart only the interests of its order, and pursues no line of policy
but the extension or preservation of its privileges. Having little to
gain and much to lose, it opposes every political change that would
either strengthen the crown or elevate the people. The nobility in the
French Revolution were the first to desert both the king and the
kingdom, and kings have always found their readiest and firmest allies
in the people. The people in Europe have no such bitter feelings
towards royalty as they have towards the feudal nobility—for kings
have never so grievously oppressed them. In Rome the patrician order
opposed alike the emperor and the people, except when they, as
chivalric nobles sometimes will do, turned courtiers or demagogues.
They were the people of Rome and the provinces that sustained the
emperors, and they were the emperors who sustained the people, and gave
to the provincials the privileges of Roman citizens.
Guaranties against excessive centralism are certainly needed, but the
statesman will not seek them in the feudal organization of society—in
a political aristocracy, whether founded on birth or private wealth,
nor in a privileged class of any sort. Better trust Caesar than
Brutus, or even Cato. Nor will he seek them in the antagonism of
interests intended to neutralize or balance each other, as in the
English constitution. This was the great error of Mr. Calhoun. No man
saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun the utter worthlessness of simple
paper constitutions, on which Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit
reliance, or that the real constitution is in the state itself, in the
manner in which the people themselves are organized; but his reliance
was in constituting, as powers in the state, the several popular
interests that exist, and pitting them against each other—the famous
system of checks and balances of English states men. He was led to
this, because he distrusted power, and was more intention guarding
against its abuses than on providing for its free, vigorous, and
healthy action, going on the principle that "that is the best
government which governs least." But, if the opposing interests could
be made to balance one another perfectly, the result would be an
equilibrium, in which power would be brought to a stand-still; and if
not, the stronger would succeed and swallow up all the rest. The
theory of checks and balances is admirable if the object be to trammel
power, and to have as little power in the government as possible; but
it is a theory which is born from passions engendered by the struggle
against despotism or arbitrary power, not from a calm and philosophical
appreciation of government itself. The English have not succeeded in
establishing their theory, for, after all, their constitution does not
work so well as they pretend. The landed interest controls at one
time, and the mercantile and manufacturing interest at another. They
do not perfectly balance one another, and it is not difficult to see
that the mercantile and manufacturing interest, combined with the
moneyed interest, is henceforth to predominate. The aim of the real
statesman is to organize all the interests and forces of the state
dialectically, so that they shall unite to add to its strength, and
work together harmoniously for the common good.
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