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.
