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Constitution," he truly says, "were far from approving the principle of the sovereignty of the people."* Even the Puritans of New England restricted the suffrage to "communicants," and allowed no share in the governing function to any other class. They were far from admitting the preposterous notion that power should be lodged in the masses, or the senseless democratic hypothesis that every man is born a statesman. It may, indeed, be said with truth, that Washington and his able associates had nothing more at heart than to "take precautions against popular influences." In his whole administration, M. Jannet adds, "Washington laboured to secure the preponderance of conservative principles, and to maintain the ascendancy of the true social authorities. We may judge what his sentiments were by what he said in a letter on the rules which, in his opinion, ought to determine the choice of officers." That opinion was expressed in these words: "What is by all means to be secured," (we translate the passage from the French version of M. Cornélis de Witt,) "is that the officers and soldiers should not belong to ranks too closely allied. The hierarchy of rank often passes from the civil to the military life. When ancient services do not require to be taken into account, the rule should be to inquire whether the candidate can, with good reason, pass for a gentleman, whether he has a true feeling of honour, and a reputation to lose." His constant solicitude about his own personal dignity, and the refinement of dress and manners which he estimated as highly as any prince in Europe, and the neglect of which in others awakened in him instinctive repugnance, attested his conviction that social distinctions are as important in a republic as in a monarchy, and that their arbitrary obliteration has no connection with the maintenance of rational liberty or true Christian equality. Hamilton, who was an accomplished gentleman, did not fear to address these words to the Convention of the State of New York: "It is an incontestable truth that the mass of the people in every country sincerely desire its prosperity; but it is equally beyond all dispute that they possess neither the intelligence nor the stability necessary to govern after a reasonable manner." This judgment was announced with equal emphasis by all the eminent men of the school of Washington and Hamilton. "The word democracy," said John Adams, in 1792, who was afterwards president, "signifies in reality only the absence of every kind of govern

"Les Etats Unis Contemporains," ch. i. § 2, p. 33.

+ P. 38.

Jannet, p. 43.

ment; and to counsel Americans to adopt such a government is to invite them to abandon their country to disorder, anarchy, and destruction." It was these wholesome maxims which the rude energy of Jefferson imputed as a reproach to the founders of the Republic, and for which he strove, with fatal success, to substitute his own dangerous theories. In the early and glorious days of his nation, he contended "we had not embraced the essential idea that governments are republican only by reason of the exactness with which they express and execute the wishes of their people. And therefore our first constitutions were regulated by no principle." Since his day, M. Jannet remarks, "Americans have only too faithfully accepted the deplorable theory of Jefferson, that the people could only bind themselves for the space of a single generation, and that every nineteen years they had the right to change their constitution and to become bankrupt.'"* Such a statement reads like a satire on human government, but is quite consistent with the teaching of the Reformation; for why should political be more stable than religious polity, or men who have the right to make any number of sects forfeit the privilege of fabricating any number of governments?

It is the inevitable reaction from this monstrous conception of the sovereignty of the people which has led, as M. Michel Chevalier noticed in 1830, to the "centralizing tendency" manifested in the great State of New York, and "which gave the signal," as M. Jannet observes forty-six years later, "to the movement of Cæsarian despotism which begins to develop itself in the United States." In other words, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people becomes sooner or later so intolerable in its practical results, that as in ancient Rome the absolutism of Augustus was deemed preferable to democratic oppression, and in modern France the irresponsible rule of Napoleon was hailed as a welcome improvement on the diabolical injustice of the Revolution; so in the country of Jefferson and Van Buren, whose noblest and most gifted citizens are reduced to enforced and involuntary silence by the rude clamour of the gross and undiscerning populace, the first encroachments of an arbitrary power not recognized by the Constitution pass almost unperceived, or awaken only a faint and feeble remonstrance. Anything is more tolerable than the state of society which the theory of government proclaimed by Jefferson creates and which is found by actual experience, in ancient France as in modern America, to be the enthronement of chaos, the ruin of order, the suppression of

* P. 54.

liberty, and the impure domination of a political faction. Human societies cannot with impunity found themselves on a basis which has no more solidity than a quicksand, and no power to support any durable structure. The inconstant will of the people, who have a right, according to Jefferson, to destroy themselves and their country once in every generation, is such a foundation. Nothing stable can be built on water. In 1777, as M. Jannet observes, the first constitution of the State of New York conceded the right of suffrage only to freeholders possessing an estate of the value of twenty pounds sterling, and to householders paying an annual rent of at least forty shillings. The Senate, the Governor, and the LieutenantGovernor were elected solely by freeholders having property to the value of one hundred pounds; while no administrative officer, and no one holding the function of judge, was chosen by popular election. In 1801 a constitutional modification of the powers of the Governor was carried by Jefferson, and in 1821 the fatal principle of universal suffrage, embracing even the magistracy and the judicial office, gained its first victory,* though it was not till 1840 that its definitive triumph was secured. From that hour, "the men most conspicuous for wisdom and virtue" were banished, with rare exceptions, from public affairs, and the people showed their capacity for self-government by substituting for them, as the programme of the new Reform party sorrowfully declares, "a class who trade in politics," and to whose obnoxious ascendancy is due "the low tone and selfishness that seem to pervade and dominate all political life," and which, in their inevitable results, "are fast sapping the foundations of the Republic."

Once more, let it be noted that these deplorable fruits of the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people are not peculiar to the United States. Wherever that doctrine has obtained even a partial recognition, in the oldest as in the newest communities, it works the same havoc. In its presence wisdom is paralyzed, and even patriotism extinguished. Loyalty expires in contact with it, because the government which it creates deserves no esteem, and can inspire no love. It is equally fatal to liberty and good sense, and all who value either have a right to fling in its face the reproach which Montalembert addressed in one of his brilliant orations to the Radicals of the French Chamber, "You have made liberty hateful." The only possible reform of such a theory of government is its suppression. The longer it lasts the more hopeless is the application of any radical remedy; not only because liberty of thought

* P. 56.

and action is constantly diminished where it prevails, but because the intemperate rule of a fluctuating majority insensibly confounds all distinction between right and wrong, banishes equity and justice, and obliterates a reverential respect for the common rights of all from the national code. M. de Tocqueville has pointed out in one of the most remarkable sections of his work, and especially in the chapters de l'Omnipotence de la majorité et de ses effets, and Influence de la démocratie sur le mouvement intellectuel, the progressive character of its destructive results; and M. Jannet quotes, in illustration of his statement, that "the idea of the sovereignty of the people, and the power exerted by the majority in the United States, has destroyed true liberty of thought," American publicists, during a long succession of years, who express the same opinion with an energy of conviction which seems to us more impressive than the most emphatic language of non-American writers. "The foolish vanity of our journals," says one of these witnesses, "repeats incessantly that we are pre-eminently a free people, and that with us liberty of thought and opinion are complete. Well, I defy any observer to name a single one of our provinces in which thought and opinion are free. It is, on the contrary, a deplorable fact, that in no region of the world is intelligence more enslaved than here. Nowhere has a more rigid and crushing despotism been established than that which public opinion exerts among us. . . . . Become a charlatan, get popular prejudice for a moment on your side, and you will force the wise to fly and hide themselves till the fatal moment when some new impostor will arise to dethrone you; such is the moral and intellectual condition of America, the least free, in reality, of all the countries of the world." +

If this is a true statement,-and it is confirmed by a host of competent native witnesses,-the doctrine of popular sovereignty is as odious to the thinking portion of the American public in our day as it was to Washington and Hamilton. But men of prudence and reflection are, in the United States as in every other land, a minority. The oldest of European monarchies would be quickly brought to the same subjection to popular errors, if their destinies were committed to a majority composed, as all national majorities must be, of the inconstant and unreflecting masses. In no country of the world is the minority endowed with higher gifts of sagacity

"De la Démocratie en Amérique," t. ii. ch. vii., and the first part of t. iii. + "Sober Thoughts on the State of the Times," p. 27; Boston, 1835, ap. Jannet, p. 66.

a false estimate of the relative importance of the natural and supernatural; and the revived paganism of our own day, less religious than that extinguished folly of which it reproduces only the worst features, tends more and more to substitute the low maxims of human policy, with its poor shifts and feeble expedients, for the eternal principles of truth and justice which the Catholic Church still proclaims to a heedless world, by which alone it can heal its abuses, reform its corruptions, and cease to be the sport either of sordid rulers who have no will to guide it to its true destiny, or of that chaotic fiction which hides its incurable incapacity under the braggart name of "the sovereignty of the people."

If, then, the people of the United States, for whom God has provided in the natural order a vast and imperial domain, whom He has endowed with gifts which may aid them to avoid the destructive follies of older communities, and to whom He proposes the supreme glory of co-operating with His Church in the victorious defence of truth, justice, and liberty, desire to attain the religious and political equilibrium which will defy the force of every disturbing current, in whatever direction it may act, they must cease to ask from mere secular wisdom the meagre palliatives which alone it is able to supply, and still more to seek in the bald projects and lame devices of empirical politicians the unhelpful remedies which such ill-equipped artists are able to dispense. Not so will they effect the reforms which their patriotism meditates. In the new world as in the old, society must be constituted on its true basis, or cease to aspire vainly after the concord, purity, freedom, and strength which spring only from alliance with God and His Church. No man can lay any other foundation than that which He has laid. It would be as futile to attempt to rear a monumental column in midocean, or suspend a granite pyramid in mid-air, as to erect any durable fabric of which He is not the builder. It is because this truth has died out of the hearts of princes and statesmen, that, as Carlyle says, "in baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European society continue swaying; now disastrously tumbling, then painfully re-adjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals.' The end of

such oscillation is death. That is the penalty which communities incur, as surely as individuals, by affecting an impossible independence of God, and by imprudent revolt against the Church which is His appointed instrument for the healing of the nations, and the only efficient defence against injustice and oppression, because the only secure home of rational

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