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?
