第63章

The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God and the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief of the government.The senate, the council of state, the legislative body, and the emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have properly no political functions, and to give them such functions is to place the sovereign under his own subjects! The real aim of the imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the guise of republicanism.It leaves and is intended to leave the nation no way of practically asserting its sovereignty but by either a revolution or a plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is permissible only where there is no regular government.

The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes no restriction on the power of the government.The French imperial constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as well as with the free action of the nation.The American constitution has all the advantages of both, and the disadvantages of neither.The convention is not the government like the British Parliament, nor a creature of the state like the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a practical form.By means of the convention the government is restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in practice either too great or too small, can be enlarged or contracted in a regular, orderly way, without resorting to a revolution or to a plebiscitum.Whatever political grievances there may be, there is always present the sovereign convention competent to redress them.The efficiency of power is thus secured without danger to liberty, and freedom without danger to power.The recognition of the convention, the real political sovereign of the country and its separation from and independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most striking features of the American constitution.

The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the constitution by the convention of the government.This constitution, as Mr.Madison well observes, divides the powers conceded by the convention to government between the General Government and the particular State governments.Strictly speaking, the government is one, and its powers only are divided and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.This division of the powers of government could never have been established by the convention if the American people had not been providentially constituted one people, existing and acting through particular State organizations.Here the unwritten constitution, or the constitution written in the people themselves, rendered practicable and dictated the written constitution, or constitution ordained by the convention and engrossed on parchment.It only expresses in the government the fact which pre-existed in the national organization and life.

This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the United States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal disintegration and Roman centralism.Misled by their prejudices and peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United States, pleading in their justification the theory of State sovereignty, attempted disintegration, secession, and national independence separate from that of the United States, but the central force of the constitution was too strong for them to succeed.The unity of the nation was too strong to be effectually broken.No doubt the reaction against secession and disintegration will strengthen the tendency to centralism, but centralism can succeed no better than disintegration has succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent of the States.The particular governments are stronger, if there be any difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the government move on in its constitutional path.