It does not trust the amiable weaknesses of human nature, and therefore it will not permit power to overstep its prescribed limits, though benevolence, good intent and patriotic purpose come along with it. Neither does it satisfy itself with flashy and temporary resistance to its legal authority. Far otherwise. It seeks for duration and permanence. It looks before and after; and, building on the experience of ages which are past, it labors diligently for the benefit of ages to come. This is the nature of constitutional liberty; and this is our liberty, if we will rightly understand and preserve it. Every free government is necessarily complicated, because all such governments establish restraints, as well on the power of government itself as on that of individuals. If we will abolish the distinction of branches, and have but one branch; if we will abolish jury trials, and leave all to the judge; if we will then ordain that the legislator shall himself be that judge; and if we place the executive power in the same hands, we may readily simplify government. We may easily bring it to the simplest of all possible forms, a pure despotism. But a separation of departments, so far as practicable, and the preservation of clear lines of division between them, is the fundamental idea in the creation of all our constitutions; and, doubtless, the continuance of regulated liberty depends on maintaining these boundaries." Unity of power, if sought for in wide-spread democracy, must always lead to monarchical absolutism. Virtually it is such; for it is indifferent what the appearance or name may be, the democracy is not a unit in reality; yet actual absolutism existing, it must be wielded by one man. is therefore essentially a one-man government. All absolutism 1 Page 122, vol. iv. of the Works of Daniel Webster. I have not transcribed this long passage without the permission of those who have the right to give it. To my mind it appears the most Demosthenian passage of that orator. Perhaps I am biased, because the extract maintains what I have always asserted on the nature of liberty, and what has shown itself with such remarkable clearness and undraped nakedness in the late French affairs. not immediately take the crown; the pear may not yet be ripe, as Nopoleon said to Sieyes; but it soon ripens, and then the avowed absolute ruler has far more power than the king whose absolute power is traditional, because the tradition itself brings along with it some limitations by popular opinion. Of all absolute monarchs, however, it is true that "it is the vice of a pure (absolute) monarchy to raise the power so high and to surround it with so much grandeur that the head is turned of him who possesses it, and that those who are beneath him. scarcely dare to look at him. The sovereign believes himself a god, the people fall into idolatry. People may then write on the duties of kings and the rights of subjects; they may.even constantly preach upon them, but the situations have greater power than the words, and when the inequality is immense, the one easily forgets his duties, the others their rights." Change 1 Guizot, Essais, sur l'Histoire de France, p. 359. General Rapp, first aid of Napoleon, gives a good picture of the false position of an absolute monarch, in his Memoirs, Paris, 1832, ch. 2. He says that "whenever Napoleon was angry, his confidants, far from appeasing him, increased his anger by their representations. 'Your majesty is right,' they would say: 'such a person has merited to be shot, or disgraced, or discarded. . . . I have long known him to be your enemy. Examples are necessary; they are necessary for the maintenance of tranquillity.' When it was required to levy contributions from the enemies' country and Napoleon would perhaps ask for twenty thousand, he was advised to demand ten more. If it was the question to levy two hundred thousand men, he was persuaded to ask for three hundred thousand; in liquidating a debt which was indisputable, they would insinuate doubts on its legitimacy, and would often cause him to reduce to a half, or a third, and sometimes entirely, the amount of the demand. If he spoke of making war, they would applaud the noble resolution: war alone would enrich France; it was necessary to astonish the world in a manner suitable to the power of the great nation. Thus it was that in provoking and encouraging expectations, and uncertain enterprises, he was precipitated into continual wars. Thus it is that they succeeded in giving to his reign a character of violence which did not belong to him. His disposition and habits were altogether good-natured. Never a man was more inclined to indulgence and more awake to the voice of humanity. I could cite thousands of examples." Whether Napoleon was good-natured or not need not be discussed the terms, and nearly every word applies to absolute democracies with equal truth. Aristotle says that the perfected democracy (what we would call democratic absolutism) is equal to the tyrannis (monarchical absolutism.) This is true, yet we must add these modifications: The power of the absolute monarch, though centered in one man, according to theory is lent to him by those over whom he rules; he may be brought to an account; but the power of an absolute democracy is fearful reality, with which there is no reckoning. It strikes, and the strikers vanish. Where shall they be impeached? Even he who led them is shielded by the inorganic multitude that followed him. It is felt to be heroic to oppose the absolute monarch; it is considered unpatriotic or treasonous to oppose the absolute democracy, or those people who call themselves the people. Absolute monarchs, indeed, often, allow free words. The philosopher Kant uttered remarkable political sentiments under Frederic the Great, and Montesquieu published his Spirit of Laws under the auspices of Madame de Tincin, the chanoiness mistress of the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, and successively mistress of many others. Montesquieu was favored by these persons; for nothing is more common than that sprightly people have a sentimental love for the theory of liberty. But neither Kant nor Montesquieu would have been suffered to utter their sentiments had there been any fear whatever that they might pass into reality. There is an immense difference between admiring liberty as a philosophical speculation, loving her like an imaginary beauty by sonnet and madrigal, and uniting with her in real wedlock for better and for worse. Liberty is the loved wife and honored companion, through this earthly life, of every true American and Englishman, and no mistress for sentimental sport or the gratification of spasmodic here, nor is it important to state that he was not so weak as represented by Rapp; but it is instructive to see how a man like Rapp, an uncompromising absolutist, unawares lays bare his own opinion of the character of an absolute monarch, because he is absolute. 1 Pol. v. 9, § 6; vi. 2, § 12. passion, nor is she for them a misty nymph with whom a mortal falls in consuming love, nor is she the antiquated portrait of an ancestor, looked upon with respect, perhaps even with factitious reverence, but without life-imparting actuality.' 1 Since the foregoing chapter was originally written, history has farnished us with many additional and impressive illustrations of some of its contents. Numerous French writers, anxious to vindicate for France the leadership in the race of civilization, yet sadly aware that liberty exists no more in France, have declared that the essence of liberty exists simply in universal suffrage, or, if they abandon even the name of liberty, that the height of political civilization consists in two things-universal suffrage and the code Napoleon, with the proclamation of which it has been stoutly maintained a French army would find the conquest of England and the regeneration of Italy an easy matter. Once the principle of universal suffrage established, the French statesmen of the imperial school demand that everything flowing from it, by what they term severe or uncompromising logic, must be accepted. This peculiar demand of severe logic is, nevertheless, wholly illogical, for politics are a means to obtain a high object, and the application to certain given circumstances is of paramount importance. We do not build houses, cure or sustain our bodies, by logic; and a bill of rights is infinitely more important and intrinsically true, than the most symmetrically logical rights of men. The "severe logic" leads, moreover, different men to entirely different results, as, for instance, Mr. Louis Blanc on the one hand, and the imperial absolutists on the other; and, if universal suffrage, without guaranteeing institutions, is the only principle of importance, the question presents itself immediately, Why appeal to it on rare occasions only, perhaps only once in order to transfer power, and what does universal suffrage mean if not the ascertaining of the opinion of the majority? If this be the object, then we must further ask, Why is discussion necessary to form the opinion suppressed, and how could Mr. de Montalembert be charged with, and tried for, having attacked the principle of universal suffrage in a pamphlet, the whole object of which could not be anything else than influencing those who, under universal suffrage, have to give their votes. This is not "severe logic." If much has happened and been written since the original penning of this chapter to illustrate the utter falsity of universal suffrage, naked and pure, we must not omit to mention, on the other hand, works of merit which have been written in a very opposite train of thought, by men of great mark, of whom Mr. de Tocqueville deserves particular mention on account of his Ancien Régime. CHAPTER XV. RESPONSIBLE MINISTERS. COURTS DECLARING LAWS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT. 24. Ir is not only necessary that every officer remain individually answerable for his acts, but it is equally important that no act be done for which some one is not responsible. This applies in particular, so far as liberty is to be protected, to that branch of government which directs the military. It is important, therefore, that no decree of government go forth without the name of a responsible person; and that the officers, or single acts of theirs, shall be tried, when trial becomes necessary, by regular action at law, or by impeachment; and that no positive order by the supreme executive, even though this be a king, as in England, be allowed as a plea for impunity. A long time elapsed before this principle came clearly to be established in England. Charles I. reproved the commons for proffering their loyalty to his own person, while they opposed his ministers, and measures which he had personally ordered. England in this, as in almost all else that relates to constitutional liberty, had the start of the continent by two hundred years and more. The same complaints were heard on the continent of Europe when lately attempts were made to establish liberty in monarchies; and more will be heard when the time of new attempts shall have arrived. Responsible ministers, and a cabinet dependent upon a parliamentary majority, were the objects of peculiar distaste to the present emperor of the French, as they have been to all absolute monarchs. His own proclamations distinctly express it, and his newspapers continue to decry the servile position of government when ministers are "in the ser |