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.
