The sovereigns may not be very wise, but they are wiser, more national, more patriotic than the mad theorists who seek to revolutionize the state and establish a government that has no hold in the national traditions, the national character, or the national life; and the statesman, the patriot, the true friend of liberty sympathizes with the national authorities, not with the mad theorists and revolutionists.
The right of a nation to change its form of government, and its magistrates or representatives, by whatever name called, is incontestable.Hence the French constitution of l, which involved that of , was not illegal, for though accompanied by some irregularities, it was adopted by the manifest will of the nation, and consented to by all orders in the state.Not its legality but its wisdom is to be questioned, together with the false and dangerous theories of government which dictated it.
There is no compact or mutual stipulation between the state and the government.The state, under God, is sovereign, and ordains and establishes the government, instead of making a contract, a bargain, or covenant, with it.The common democratic doctrine on this point is right, if by people is understood the organic people attached to a sovereign domain, not the people as individuals or as a floating or nomadic multitude.By people in the political sense, Cicero, and St.Augustine after him, understood the people as the republic, organized in reference to the common or public good.With this understanding, the sovereignty persists in the people, and they retain the supreme authority over the government.The powers delegated are still the powers of the sovereign delegating them, and may be modified, altered, or revoked, as the sovereign judges proper.The nation does not, and cannot abdicate or delegate away its own sovereignty, for sovereign it is, and cannot but be, so long as it remains a nation not subjected to another nation.
By the imperial constitution of the French government, the imperial power is vested in Napoleon III., and made hereditary in his family, in the male line of his legitimate descendants.This is legal, but the nation has not parted with its sovereignty or bound itself by contract forever to a Napoleonic dynasty.
Napoleon holds the imperial power "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," which means simply that he holds his authority from God, through the French people, and is bound to exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution as the legislature is to repeal any law it is competent to enact, and in doing so breaks no contract, violates no right, for Napoleon and his descendants hold their right to the imperial throne subject to the national will from which it is derived.In case the nation should revoke the powers delegated, he or they would have no more valid claim to the throne than have the Bourbons, whom the nation has unmistakably dismissed from its service.
The only point here to be observed is, that the change must be by the nation itself, in its sovereign capacity; not by a mob, nor by a part of the nation conspiring, intriguing, or rebelling, without any commission from the nation.The first Napoleon governed by a legal title, but he was never legally dethroned, and the government of the Bourbons, whether of the elder branch or the younger, was never a legal government, for the Bourbons had lost their original rights by the election of the first Napoleon, and never afterwards had the national will in their favor.The republic of was legal, in the sense that the nation acquiesced in it as a temporary necessity; but hardly anybody believed in it or wanted it, and the nation accepted it as a sort of locum tenens, rather than willed or ordained it.
Its overthrow by the coup d'etat may not be legally defensible, but the election of Napoleon III.condoned the illegality, if there was any, and gave the emperor a legal title, that no republican, that none but a despot or a no-government man can dispute.As the will of the nation, in so far as it contravenes not the law of God or the law of nature, binds every individual of the nation, no individual or number of individuals has, or can have, any right to conspire against him, or to labor to oust him from his place, till his escheat has been pronounced by the voice of the nation.The state, in its sovereign capacity, willing it, is the only power competent to revoke or to change the form and constitution of the imperial government.The same must be said of every nation that has a lawful government; and this, while it preserves the national sovereignty, secures freedom of progress, condemns all sedition, conspiracy, rebellion, revolution, as does the Christian law itself.
