What the Rebellion Teaches, BQR for July 1862

WHAT THE REBELLION TEACHES.
      [From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1862.]
Dr. Keogh, the able and loyal editor of the Pittsburg Catholic, has in his popular lecture before the Catholic Institute of Cincinnati, given a very condensed, clear, explicit and just statement of the Catholic principles of government as taught by the greatest and most approved fathers and doctors of the church. To those familiar with the writings of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmine, and Suarez his statement contains indeed little that is new, but it presents their doctrine in a popular form, and applies it to the great struggles now raging between legitimate anthority and revolutionism both at home and abroad. His lecture, which we should be glad  to see widely circulated, is timely, and brings out and enforces certain great principles of which the people, whether orthodox or heterodox, cannot be too frequently reminded, and with which they cannot be too thoroughly imbued,-principles which, had been more generally held and more generally understood, would have saved Europe from revoluntionary terrorism, and our own country from the fearful evils of the civil war, with which she is now so sorely afflicted. 
Men who pique themselves on being "practical men," men of "plain common sense," are apt to treat with contempt those of us who deal with principles, and labor to establish sound and just doctrines; but all experience proves that the people collectively as well as individually are logical, and sure, sooner or later, to draw from their premises their logical conclusion. If they start with false theory of authority, they are cetain to fetch up in despotism, and, if with a false theory of liberty, they are just as certain to fetch up in revolutionism, anarchy, or license. A false theory respecting the divine orgin of power has led nation after nation to submit to the misrule and oppression of despots, and a false theory as to popular sovereignty subjects all European society to the terror of revolutionism, and in this country leads to rebellion, secession, and civil war. The doctrine of popular sovereignty held and proclaimed  by our American press, both North and South, fully justifies secession, and condemns the federal government for its attempt to coerce the rebellious states into submission. If the people are sovereign, and government is nothing but an agency, created by them for carrying out their will, as modern demagogy teaches, by what right do you deny the people of the slaveholding states the right to secede from the Union, and to form a southern confederacy, if such be their pleasure? Either the theory which you have insisted on in the case of all foreign revolutions is untenable, and should be promptly disavowed, or you are wrong in attempting to enforce the laws of the Union over states that do not choose to obey them. If the Emilian provinces had the right to secede from the papal authority, and annex themselves to Peidmont, why has not South Carolina the right to secede from the Union, and enter into the southern confederacy? Yet there are men, that hailed the secession of the Emilian provinces as glorious assertion of freedom, who are now fighting against South Carolina, and willing to see her annihilated. There are men amongst us, men who applaud to the echo Garibaldi, that prince of freebooters, laud him as a patriot and a hero, who yet demand the capture and execution of Jefferson Davis as a traitor. It is said that even our government actually invited Garibaldi to accept a commin ssion in our army, and there was at one time a report that he was to be its commander-in-chief, -he, a man not worthy to be named in the same breath with even Jefferson Davis, John B. Floyd, or Gideon Pillow!
It is of the last importance that we start with sound and just primciples. It is absurd to claim the right to resist government, if it governs by divine right, or to undertake to suppress a rebellion, if the people are above law, and absolutely and persistently sovereign, as our demagogues assert. In either case the inconsistency is too great to be permanently successful. We ourselves support the government, because we belive in government, and do not believe in the deemagogical doctrine of popular sovereignty. We love both liberty and authority, and believe in the possibility of neither without the other. We opposed the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849; we opposed the revolution that reestablished the Napoleonic dynasty in 1852, the revoluntionary campaign of the French in Italy in 1859, and have opposed all the Italian revolutions for which it prepared the way, and which it stirred up. We condemned the secession of the Emilian provinces from the papal authority, and the annexation of the duchies to the Sard Kingdom. We justified the attempt of the sovereigm of Rome to reduce his emperor of Austria in his efforts to save his empire from dismemberment. We are perfectly consistent, therefore, in denying the right of southern secession, and in sustaining the federal government in the use of force for coercing the rebellious states into submission, and in putting forth its full strength to presetve the Union, and save the life and integrity of the nation. We should have been equally false to out country and to our principles had we not done so. 
We may be told here in answer to our boast of consistency, that we, also, defended the cause of Italian Unity, and recommended the union of all Italy under the sceptre of the house of Savoy. Be it so. We desired and desire Italian unity; we wish Italy to be a united Italy, embracing under a wise, just, and honorable constitutional government the whole peninsula, as a desideratum in European politics. But we were never willing, and are not now willing, to see it effected by revolutionary or despotic violence. We never were willing to encourage secession or invasion as the means of effecting it, thought, if effected by such means, we maintained, and still dare maintain, that, when effected, it would be wiser to accept it, as un fait accompli, acquiesce in it, and make the best terms possible with it, than to make unavailing attempts to restores the old order of things. This is all that can be said agianst us, and this much we can maintain in perfect consistency with out principles, even if it be an error of judgment. 
Moreover, the reasons which make us wish the unity of Italy, lead us to oppose the sidintergration of the American Union. This is the epoch of great states, great powers, as they are called, and small states or powers stand a poor chance of existence, and still a poorer chance of independence. The great powers manage the politics of the world as suits themselces, or, as they can best agree among themselves. Since the popes have ceased to be at the head of the political system of Europe, the division of Italy into a number of petty states has deprived her political influence, and reduced her to a "geographical expression." We would see, if the thing be practiable (of which we have out doubts, as things go), a united, independent, constitutional Italy, as one of the great powers of Europe. Such an Italy is neccessary to keep up the equilibrium between Catholic and non-Catholic Europe, and to secure the balance of power in the Old World. We would preserve the American Union in order to preserve the American state as one of the great states or powers of the world, and to insure to the New World her proper rank and political influence. We oppose the disintergration of the Union, becuase its disintegreation would reduce America to a mere goegraphical expression and compel the people of this continent to follow the politics and submit to the will or caprice of the great powers of the Old World. We want the United States to remain a great power, so that it may compel respect to its rights and interests, and give weight to its views and wishes in the politics of the European states. We do not want to see our great republic reduced to the rank of a second or third power. Our political principles and out patriotism alike make us wish that it should, at least, preserve its rank and its power. So, under any and every point of view, we are consistent with ourselves in opposing secession, and seeking to preserve the life and integrity and integrity of the republic. 
Secession itself is another illustration of the importance of theory. Secession is only a logical deduction from the theory of state sovereignty, which has been favored to some extent almost from the formation of the federal government, and in the North as well as in the South, and alternately by all parties. Patrick Henry, of Virginia, and Samuel Adams, of Massachusetts, oppsed the federal consitiution on the ground that it created a national government, and they wanted only a confederacy of congress of sovereign states. Mr. Jefferson inclined to the view that the stares retained their sovereignty even after the adoption of the constitution. Such was the dominant view of Republican, came into power with Mr. Jefferson in 1801, and it has always been the doctrine, or at least the doctrinal tendency, of the so-called Democratic party. President Jackson opposed it when asserted and acted on by South Carolina, and favored it in the adjoining state of Georgia, whose nullification of a judgement of the supreme court was no less reprehensible than South Carolina's nulliflcation of an act of congress. The New-England states, excepting Vermont, all but ruined by the war forced on the country by the southern and middle states, resorted to it in 1812, and threatened to secede from the Union. The doctrine has been lurking in the American mind from the first, and the section that felt itself aggrieved has always more or less boldly assumed it. South Carolina did little more in 1831, than Massachusetts talked of doing in 1814. If we suppose that the states entered the Union as sovereigns, and that each remains after the union a sovereign state, it will be hard to say that any state has not the inherent right to secede, when she judges it for her interest to do so; and equally hard to say, that, if she do judges and secedes, the remaining states have the right to use force to compel her to return to the Union.  Moreover, if she remains a sovereign state, she can, by revoking her act of accession to the Union, absolve all her citizens from their allegiance to the Untied Sates, and require them to take the oath of allegiance to herself. You have no right to call seceders or the confederates rebels, or to treat them as rebels or traitors, if you concede their doctrine of state sovereignty, In fact, there are few, if any, among them who reagrd themselves as traitors or rebels, in their view of the case, they are as loyal and as patriotic as we are in ours.
Let no man mistake us. We are not justifying the southern rebellion. The whole country knows on which side we are, and that according to our ability and in our own narrow sphere no man had done or sacrificed more than we for the sake of the Union. We hold secession to be rebellion; be we can do so only on condition that we reject the theory of state sovereignty on which they act, and which has recieved too much countenance in all parts of the Union. The fact that a theory which justifies them, or would justify them if true, has been widely entertained, and entertained by men of eminence, whose loyalty and patioitism are not to be questioned, may have, and, perhaps, should have, some weight with us in moderating our personal feelings toward them, and even in mitigrating the punishment we may deem it necessary to inflict on them when the rebellion has been suppressed. But not for this do we state it. We state it for the purpose of indicating the danger of false theories, and to rebuke those self-complacent men who are so ready to denounce as vain "theorizers" and "abstactionists" those who call attentionto the first principel, and seek to establish a sound political philosophy. We have, not all of us, but large numbers of us, cherished two false principles, one in relation to government in general, and the other in realtionto the federal government in particular, - principles which we find in this hour of trial we cannot act on, without giving up all government, and suffering the Union to fall to pieces as a rope of sand. The blood and treasure which are so freely poured out by the loyal states in defence of the authority of the government and the inegrity of the nation, are the earnest and practical protest of a great and free people against the demagogical interpretation of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the disintegrating doctrine of state sovereignty, and titis to be hoped that the war when it closes will have corrected both, the one as gatal to gvernment itselg, and the other as fatal to national unity and integrity. 
We love our form of government; we want no alterations in the federal constitution, and very few in any of the several state constitutions. We are republican, heart and soul, and far more so than we were before the rebellion broke out. We have had out confidence in popular government incalculably increased by the experience of the last twelve months. The strength and energy put forth by the United States, the mighty army we have been able, within a year, to collect, arm and equip, discipline and place in the field; the large and effcient navy we have been able to create and place on our coats and mighty rivers, the respectable efficiency of both branches of the service, and the orderly behaviors, patience, endurance, and bravery of both our land and naval forces, have, we confess, astonished us, made us proud of our country and proud of our counrty men. A people so long engaged in peaceful pursuits, so long in the enjoyment of peace as to have almost lost the tradition as well as the experience of war, without military organization, without armies, ships, arms, or stores, sending more than a half a million of soldiers to the field, and creating, arming, and equipping and effcient navy of two or three hundred ships-of-war, in so brief a time, may well be called a great people. Blunders there may have been, arising from inexperience; traitors there may have been in and out of office to embarrass our measures, and impede our operations; and much narrow-mindness and ineffciency there may also have been; but after all we have shown an aptitude, and energy, and strength, unsurpassed by any other people in the history of the world. No, this civil war, whether it terminate in a few months, or whether it linger for a dozen years, has for ever settled the question in favor of free government, and rendered the old arguments against it obsolete. It has proved that, if the republic had been united in a war agianst foreign enemies, it would have been invincible agianst all Europe, for we count as ours, as American, the skill, the energy, and the strength shown by the rebels themselves.
Universal suffrage, which, we own, we had come to distrust, has vindicated itself, and the people have proved that they are capable of self-government, and can dispense with both kings and nobles. Even our liberal naturalization laws, and our open hospitality to foreigners, which we with many others feared might prove dangerous to our American orderof civilization, have been justified, and Know-nothingism has lost its last advocate. In the war natural-born and naturalized citizens have fought with equal bravery and devotion side by side. German, Irish, French, Italian born citizens have proved themselves loyal Americans, have been not the last to rush in where blows fall thickest and fall heaviest, and have contributed their full share to the victories we have won, and to the glory of our arms. All are Americans by loyalty, by common hardships, by common dangers, and by common deeds. They who have mingled their blood on the same battle-field, in defence of the same noble cause, must henceforth be, and be treated, as brothers. The war has made or is making us one people, and has removed or is removing more than one of the old causes of division. No American can forget that chiefly to the sturdy Germans of the West we owe it that the great state of Missouri did not follow her sister slave states into secession, or that in the very darkest hour, when even stout hearts failed, the brave and impulsive Irish were foremost to volunteer in the armies of the republic. No American can ever forget that full one-third of the forces that have won our victories, and saved the life and integrity of the nation were not born on American soil. Disloyal as have been many of those who belong to our own church, and as absurd as are the prejudices of many of our brethren agianst New England, no loyal Protesant can ever forget that in the nation's struggle for life Catholics have sent to the field both in officers and men far more than their proportion. The proportion of Catholics in the army is probably more than double the proportion which Catholics bear to the whole populaion of the country. After this no sane American can ever countenancean anti-foreign, or an anti-Catholic party in politics. Foreign-born citizens have sealed their naturalization with their blood, and Catholics have vindicated their right to civil and political equality in everydefeat that has been suffered, and in every victory that has been won. No blood has flowed more freely or in richer torrents than theirs, and the non-catholic who forgets it is not worthy the name of American, and should undergo the old Anglo-Saxon punishment of being branded nidering,-infamous. 
We own, and are glad to own, that the war has corrected many of our own prejudices, and relieved many of our fears; it has given us full confidence in the strength and durability of our institutions. It has, also, corrected many errors the popular mind had imbibed, and exploded more than one popular fallacy. It has proved the necessity of upholding the legitimate authority of government, and therefore refuted the notion that government is a mere agency, with no power, in case of need, to coerce obedience to law are as necessary, and as indispensable as in monarchical states. It has refuted the popular theories of revolutionists so rife in our times, and proved the necessity of conservative principles, and respect for established authority. Happily the war came in season to arrest our wild readicalism, before the heart of our people become wholly corrupt, and before they had become as base as the theories of their demagogues. The rebellion has shown, also, that the Union can be saved only by rejecting the interoretation of the constitution that makes the United States a mere congress of sovereigns, and by adopting and adhering to the doctrine that assumes them to be a nation, a real state, one and indivisible. The people in the loyal states have acted right in the present struggle, but they have done so only in opposition to opinions and theories which had grained great credit in all sections of the country. The doctrines that there is a sacred right of revolution, and that a state cannot be coerced, gave the rebellion every advantage under the inbecile Buchanan, enabled it to mature itself without resistance, and to make openly all the preparations supposed to be necessary to secure its success, and paralyzed for months the avtivity and strength of the present administration. Even stanch Republicans shook before these doctrines, and many of our ablest statesmen and truest patriots feared to grapple with the danger, and talked of "compromise," some even thought we must let the seceding states go. It was doubtful how far the administration could count on the support of the free states themselves in an attempt to put down the rebelion by force of arms. If patriotism had not triumphed over theory, and if the people had not felt it more urgent to maintain the integrity of the nation than to carry out the speculations of their demagogues, the administration would have been unable to collect force enough to defend for a single day the national capital. The danger was far greater than has been told, and, perhaps, than ever will be told. The rebellion is crushed, or is sure to be crushed, if no foreign power intercenes, because the northern Democratic leaders rose above their doctrines, and refused to fulfil the expections of their southern brethern, who counted on them as friends and allies. The rebellion has proved that the doctrines we refer to are, as far as they could go, incompatible with the stability of government, and especially with the maintenance of the life and integrity of the nation, and therefore that they are false and dangerous, and to be abandoned in speculation as we have been forced to abandon them in practice. The war, we hope, will have the effect to conform our theories to the practice which all loyal men now see to be just and necessary, and which the people have so generously and heroically adopted. 
The principles of government which are as necessary under a republican as under any other form of government, requrie us to distinguish between the power, and the person or persons invested with it. THe power comes from God, for, as says the apostle, non est potestas, nisi a Deo; but being from God, it is necessarily a trust, not an absolute, inherent right. Here is the real distinction between legitimate authority and caesarism; liberty and depotism. The prejudice against the divine orgin of power grows out of the failure to make this destinction, and of assuming that the assertion of the power, or authority, as from God, means that God has given to certain individuals or certain families, the indefeasible right to govern, an inalienable and inadmissble right, which cannot, whatecer the character of the ruler or the intolerable tyranny of his government, be reruler or the intolerbale tyranny of his government, be resisted with out impiety, and rebellion agianst God, the doctrine known in history as the "divine right of kings and passive obedience." This doctrine makes the prince the living law, according to the maxim of the old Roman jurist, Quod placuit principi, id legis habet vigorem. This is what we call caesarism, and oppose as despotism, which is destructive alike of the best interests of socitey and the true dignity of man. It lies at the basis of the old Roman imperialism, under which the emperpor was the living law and worshipped as a divinity. Even the Christian and orthodox Emperor Theodosius was addressed by his subjects as "your eterinty." This doctrine was revived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in England lost the Stuarts their throne, and in France provoked the old French revolution, while it reduced Spain from the formost power of Europe to a third-rate state, and Italy to "a geographical expression." No sane man, who knows aught of liberty, can for one moment countenance the divine origin of government in the sense of this doctrine. 
To get rid of "the divine right of kings and passive obedicence," the friends of freedom went to the opposite extreme, asserted the popular origin of power, and made the people in their own native right and might the living law. These made the people Caesar, the popular will the law, and asserted as a maxium, Vox populi vox Dei, or Quod placeuit populo, id legis habet vigorem, and therefore in principle as absolute a despotism as that asserted by the caesarists they warred agianst. This is the condemnation of modern philosophical democracy, as defended by Mazzini and his friends, who do not hesitate to clothe the people with all the attributes claimed by the old imperialists for the emperor, and to say not only "people-prince," "people-king," but "people-priest," and "people-god." It is in the name of this "people-divinity" that democratic revolutions in Europe, of late years, have been commenced, and of which Garibaldi is the soldier, and Mazzini is the prophet. Mazzini is the Mahomet and Garbaldi the Kaled of this new worship, a political imposture, for withstanding which any amount of abuse has been heaped on Pio Nono, Francis Joseph, and the young king of Naples. It is this political theory, called by us European democracy, and which like all the vices of the Old World, has of late years found its way to our counrty, that we for nearly twenty years have been battling with out best ability, and holding up to our readers as wholly incompatible with American republicanism American democracy, which, to avoid confusion, we call republicanism, has and can have no affinity with this European democracy, and can no more be reconciled with it than Christianity can be reconciled with demon-worship.
The true theory of the orgin of government is dialectic, and harmonizes these two extremes. The power, the right, or the authority if from God, who says "By me kinds reign, and lawgivers decree just things," but who shall be the depositary of the power, exercise the trust, is a matter determinable by the people themselves. The power comes from God, but comes to the prince or government through the people. Since the power comes from God, it comes from a source above all people, and they neither individually nor collectively have any right to resist it, and are bound in conscience to repsect and obey it. The law of God settles the authority or right of government, and the people settle the questionwho shall be governors, or who shall exercise the power. When the people have settled the form of the government, and have legally chosen their rulers, these rulers, within the linits and conditions fixed by the constitution, have the divine right to gobern, do govern by authority of God, and the people individually and collectively are bound to obey them, not as the ministers of their will, but as ministers of the divine will, and therefore obedience is due them in conscience, and disobedience is not only a crime against society, but a sin agianst God.This princeiple gives authority and stability to government, for it gives it the right to wield the sword, to punish evil doers and to enforce obedience to its acts, whileit denies all right of resistance, and binds all subjects in conscience to obedience. It also secures freedom by making the power a trust, and placing in the hands of the people the right to determine who shall and who shall not be vested with it.
The theory of "the divine right of kinds and passive obedience," the caesarist theory, as ecpounded by James I. of England, Louis XIV. of France, Phillip II. of Spain, and the great Bossuet, does not deny that the monarch is responsible to God for the use he may make of his power, or that God will punish him, here or hereafter, in his own person or in his descendants, for any injustice, tryanny, or oppression of which he may be quilty, but it denies that he is resion of which he may be quilty, but it denies that he is responsible to nation ot justiciable by the people. It, consequently, denies to the nation or the people all right of resistance, not simply to legitimate authority, but to tyranny and oppression, and leaves them without any right to demand, and, if neccessary, to effect by force a redress of grivances. It, therefore, covers the oppressor with the aegis of religion, and renders oppresion sacred and inviolable. The other theory, European democratic theory, makes the personsinvested with authority responsible indeed, but to the poeple alone, and asserts for the people the right to resist their rulersat any time, in any way, and for any reason the please. It divests government of all moral sanction, deprives obediecnce of all religious obligation, and makes civil obedience a mere question of expediency, and results necessarily in mobocracy, to use a barbarous term, anarchy, or the despotism of the majority. The dialectic theory we adopt makes rulers responsible to God, as all men are, and also to the nation, or to the people. To the people, because they receive their investiture from them, and to God, because the power with which they are clothed is from him, and remains his. What is essential to the existence and maintenance of government, the essential and necessary rights of authority under any and every form of government, are from God, held and exercised by divine right, independently of all popular conventions or popular will.These are the divine or natural rights of government in that it is government. The people may say who shall or shall not be intrusted with the exercise of these rights, bat the rights themselves are determined by the very nature of civil society, and depend on the eternal reason or will of the Creator. No popular conventions, however called or constituted, can create them, or rightly abridge them. They rest on the same basis with the rights of man,—rights held from the Almighty in the very constitution of our manhood. All Americans hold the natural rights of man sacred and inviolable; the essential rights, we would say, the natural rights, of civil society should be held equally sacred and inviolable, for they are equally from God. IJet our countrymen so hold, and they will hold what we assert in asserting that the power is from God.
What we wish here to assert is that the power is not conventional, nor of popular, nor indeed of human institution,
therefore that it can never be justly resisted by the people either collectively or individually, and that it has the right to command, and the right to use all the force necessary to maintain itself, to suppress all opposition and to make its commands obeyed, however large or small the party opposing it. Even in constituting the government the people have no right to deny it any of its essential or natural rights, or to restrict power beyond the limits of the divine charter. Any clause in the constitution doing this mnst be treated as null and void, as repugnant to natural right, to the necessary and essential authority of civil society. In other words, there is a higher law than the will of the people,—the original divine law of civil society. The government while obeying this law, without which it would not and could not be government, and keeping within the limits of its conventional restrictions, is legitimate, sacred, and inviolable, and cannot, as we have said, be resisted without crime against the state, and sin against God, since natural law is divine law. This, as we have said, secures the stability and authority of government, by limiting the power of the people over it, and denying the right of popular resistance to it so long as it simply discharges its legitimate functions and does not transgress its legitimate bounds. Yet it by no means demands passive obedience to the tyrant, or forbids popular resistance to wrong and oppression, or what was formerly understood by the right of revolution, for the oppressor or the tyrant forfeits to the people the power that comes from God.
In the modern sense, as now understood by European revolutionists, the right of revolution cannot be asserted, for it denies the right of government. Formerly the right of revolution meant simply the right to resist and overthrow tyranny. This right no lover of freedom can question. A government that abuses and persists in abusing its trusts, that plays the tyrant, that perverts power from the common good, or the good of the community, that makes it a burden and a curse instead of a common benefit, and obstinately persists in so doing, forfeits its rights, loses its authority, becomes a usurper, and therefore may be justly resisted, and made to give place to another, because in resisting it there is no resistance to the power that comes from God. The tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance. All that comes from God is dialectic, and his grants cannot contradict one another. His patent of the rights of man to the individual is in harmony with his patent of authority to civil society, and he can give no power of government to society incompatible with the rights he gives to the individual. When the individual uses the rights of man in a sense incompatible with the rights of authority, he Hits, and society may set him right; so when the government uses its power in a sense incompatible with the rights of man, it transcends its authority, and may be corrected by the people. The right of revolution in this sense we assert. But the right of revolution seems to us, as popularly understood at present, to mean the right to overthrow any existing government even by violence and bloodshed whenever the people, or a portion of them numerous or strong enough to do it, choose to attempt it, simply for the sake of introducing another and as they believe a better political organization, although no act of tyranny or oppression can be alleged against it. In this sense we deny the right of revolution, as incompatible with the very idea of government.
One government may be more wisely constituted than another, and it often happens that the growth and prosperity of a nation demand grave changes in the constitutional law; but if the government is honestly administered according to the existing constitution, and its administrators take care to usurp no power, we deny the right of the people to seek even a desirable change by revolutionary violence. In such a case the remedy is reform, not revolution,—reform brought about by peaceful, not violent measures, by the cooperation of authority, secured by the force of public opinion. The right of resistance must not be confounded with the present sense of the word revolution. The right of resistance to tyranny is a sacred and divine right, as sacred and divine as the right of legitimate government itself; the right of revolution as the word is now used has no existence, and revolution is not and cannot be justifiable.
The power in the case of the federal government, as in that of all other governments, comes from God through the people, but through the people acting as political communities, not simply as population. These political communities or states are the successors or continnators of the English colonies created by the British crown, or under the sovereignty of Great Britain, and therefore, though political communities or bodies politic and corporate, and since the revolution no longer colonies, they are not complete or sovereign states. The sovereignty previously in the British crown or in the mother country was not assumed or exercised by the colonies severally, and on becoming independent of Great Britain they did not each for itselt succeed to her sovereignty, or to any more power than they had possessed sis colonies. Tlmt is, the mother country was succeeded not by the states severally, but by the United States. The United States as one political people. took the place in the new order introduced by the revolution previously held by the mother country, and therefore became in their unity the inheritor of her sovereignty. The revolution simply transferred the sovereignty from Great Britain to the United States. Hence, under the old confederation and even after the adoption of the federal constitution, some of the states continued to act under the colonial charters granted by the British crown. The states, have, as had the colonies, certain civil and political rights, but never at any moment have they held or claimed the full rights of sovereignty. As colonies the sovereignty was in Great Britain or the British crown; under the confederation the sovereignty was claimed, possessed, and exercised not by the states separately, but by the United States, as it is under the federal constitution.
We will not say that, if the several Anglo-American colonies had each in its individual capacity asserted and maintained its independence, it would not have become on its successful assertion of its independence a free sovereign state possessed ofthe full rights of sovereignty, and the Union formed between them been a congress or league of sovereigns, a union of the nature of the Zollverein formed by the northern states of Germany. But such was not the fact. The independence was declared by the united colonies, which by this fact became united states. The articles of confederation were drawn up by the united states, and the new political power recognized and treated with by foreign nations, and finally acknowledged by Great Britain, was not thirteen independent powers or sovereignties, but one power, one national sovereignty, called the United States of America. The people of the United States have, therefore, always been and are one political people, and have never existed as separate, independent, and sovereign states. Under the colonial regime the political unity was in the British crown; under the confederation it was in the United States, and it is in the United States under the federal constitution, and where is lodged the unity, there is lodged the sovereignty of a nation.
Nor will we say that there were in transferring the sovereignty from the British crown to the United States no irregularities, no isolated acts incompatible with the doctrine we advocate. Revolutionary times are seldom remarkable for their order and regularity. But what is disorderly, irregular, or anomalous in those times establishes no precedent, and forms no rule of interpretation. With the exception of Vermont and Texas, not included in the original "Thirteen," no state in this Union has ever existed as an independent sovereign state. None of them has ever been recognized as a sovereign power by any foreign state, ever exercised the functions of a sovereign power, ever entered into relations with foreign powers, negotiated foreign treaties, or had the right to make war or peace. The supreme attributes of sovereignty they have never as a fact possessed, exercised, or, until recently, claimed. Foreign nations have known and now know only the United States. All our foreign treaties are negotiated by and with the United States; the only flag floating from ships of war or commerce, known on the ocean, or in foreign ports is the United States flag; the United States make war and peace, enter into and discharge national obligations, acquire and hold national territory by purchase or conquest, and stand recognized and respected by all the nations of the earth as an independent sovereign nation. None of the several states, excepting Vermont and Texas, have ever been so recognized, performed any of these functions, or sustained any of these relations; and the exception in the case of Vermont and Texas amounts to nothing, for in the Union they stand on the same footing with the original states. The states have never exercised the rights of sovereignty, and have remained political and independent communities only in the sense in which they were such communities when colonies under the crown of Great Britain. They hold their civil and political rights now, as when they were colonies, in subordination to the national sovereign.
We know there were differences of opinion at the epoch of the formation of the federal constitution, that some patriots wished to reserve a larger and others a smaller sphere of action to the states, and some wished, it is probable, to make the Union simply a congress of sovereigns. There are, no doubt, in the constitution traces of these differences of opinions and wishes; but it is clear that the convention of 1787 intended to frame, and regarded themselves as framing a constitution of a national government, a constitution for one political people, and the few phrases or even provisions that smack of the state sovereignty theory were inserted or suffered to remain so as to escape the danger of having the constitution rejected by any one of the states. The convention were content to secure the substance of nationality, without pushing the state sovereignty men to the wall. They effected their object, though not without some ambiguity of language, and leaving a chance for cavillers and pettifoggers.
The fact that the constitution was formed by a convention of the people as states, and that the constitution was ratified by the states, or conventions of the people of the several states, has led even some who assert the national character of the government to suppose the constitution emanated from the states severally, and not from the people of the United States, and that the American people became one political people only by virtue of the constitution. This, we believe, was Mr.Webster's doctrine. But this is contradicted by the very preamble of the constitution itself, which says, "We the people of the United States,"—not we the people of the several states,—" do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." The people of the United States are not created by the constitution, for they precede it, and ordain and establish- it. Our own former error on the subject grew out of supposing the states succeeded severally not onlyto the rights of the colonies under the British crown, but to the sovereignty possessed by that crown itself. This was a mistake. The sovereignty of the crown did not fall to the states severally, but to the United States, and therefore after independence, as before, the states severally were subordinate, not sovereign political communities, and the people of the United States were one political people with a single national sovereign. This, if we are not mistaken, is substantially the doctrine held by John Quincy Adams, no mean authority in questions of this sort.
Art. X. of the amendments has been adduced in defence of a doctrine opposite to the one we are defending. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Hence it has been argued that the powers of the United States are powers delegated to it by the states, and that all the powers of government not so delegated are reserved to the states severally, or to the people, not of the United States, but of the several states. But this inference is not necessary, and the amendment, though undoubtedly intended as a constitutional guaranty of the reserved rights of the several states, says nothing in favor of state sovereignty. It asserts indeed that the federal government is a government of delegated and limited powers, bnt it does not assert that the United States are created by state delegation, or that the political people called the United States have only delegated and limited powers. In the amendment the term United Stale* must he taken in the sense of the government created or perfected by the constitution. The federal government has only delegated powers, but the powers are delegated by the people of the united, not the several states. It is a government of limited powers, because the people so willed, not because the powers of the people of the United States are limited by the rights of the people of the several states. The reservation, again, is to the states respectively, or to the people. But what people? The article does not say, to the people of the states respectively, or the people of the states severally, and therefore we must understand them to be the people of the United States, the very people assembled in convention to constitute the national government.
There is nothing in our view of the unity and sovereignty of the people of the United States to interfere with the federal element of our government. The states severally were never complete, that is, sovereign states, for, as we have seen, the British sovereignty over the colonies did not fall to the states severally, but to the states united, or, the United States. But the colonies, though created at different dates and differently constituted, had by royal grant, charter, or custom, certain political and civil rights, which they retained after independence. These rights rendered uniform in all the states, enlarged in some respects and abridged in others by the federal constitution, are in their substance and in their tenure anterior to that constitution, and are what we called the reserved rights of the states, that is to say, rights which the United States willed should be reserved and guarantied to the states severally. These rights, even as colonial rights, were rights the sovereign was bound to treat as sacred and inviolable, and it was for his alleged violation of them his sovereignty was abjured, and independence declared. Even under the British crown the colonies within the sphere of their rights were legally free and independent political communities. They remain so under the sovereignty of the United States, and the federal government is bound to treat those rights as sacred and inviolable. They are recognized and guarantied by the constitution.
But we may remark that, after all, these rights were not original in the colonies as civil society, and could not be defended by them as their natural rights of government. They were rights held by them as British colonies and as British subjects, and were therefore of the nature of franchises, of chartered, or of vested rights. They were sacred and inviolable only so long as they who held them observed the conditions expressed or implied in the grant. They could be forfeited as all such rights may be forfeited, and the king might issue his writ quo warranto against any one of the colonies, and, on evidence of forfeiture, revoke the charter, as in several cases was actually done. The United States holds substantially the relation to the several states held by the British crown to the Anglo-American colonies. The rights of the several states are the rights of those colonies, and are held by them as American states and American citizens, not as original, independent, and sovereign states. As long as the express or implied conditions of their charter or tenure are complied with, they are sacred and inviolable, and within their sphere the states are independent of the national government, and of one another. But if they break these conditions, if they cease to be American states, and their people to be citizens of the United States, they forfeit their liberties, and the United States as sovereign has the right to revoke their charters, or annul their state constitutions, and enter upon their possession as upon any other forfeited estate. The state by its own act has lapsed, and the sovereign only resumes what is his own. Hence Mr. Sumner was right in declaring state secession state suicide, as we proved by a slightly different line of argument in our last Review.
The right of a state to resist the federal government, in case it becomes tyrannical and oppressive, is precisely the right, neither greater nor less, of individuals to do the same, and what that is, has been already stated. So long as the federal government keeps within its constitutional powers, it governs by divine right, and no state or individual has any moral or political right to resist it. If the free and fair exercise of its legitimate powers bears unequally upon different sections, changes or reforms may be sought, but only in a constitutional way, and by peaceful means. 'No violence, no insurrection, no rebellion, no armed resistance is lawful. The condemnation of the southern seceders is that they have resisted the federal government in the exercise of its legitimate powers, without having a single act of tyranny or in contravention of the constitution to allege against it. And they could not have such act without condemning themselves, for they have controlled the federal administration, and shaped its policy for more than three-fourths of the time since the organization of the government. For the twenty-four years next preceding the present administration they had every thing pretty much their own way, and if any portion of the people had any right to complain, it was not the people of the slave states. No doubt the abolitionists said and printed many things annoying to them, and some of the free states passed laws not acceptable to them; but the people of the free states had to complain of laws far more objectionable passed by them, and of numerous and gross outrages upon their citizens at the South, such as imprisonment, expulsion, lynching, tar-and-feathering, and hanging, for which no redress could be obtained. Yet the federal government, while it suffered unrebuked southern outrages upon northern citizens, was never restrained by the personal-liberty laws, and executed its own laws faithfully as far as the North was concerned. The South really had no grievance to complain of from the government, and the seceding states have never had a shadow of excuse for their rebellion. If the southern "chivalry " disliked being yoked with northern " mudsills," they were free to seek a separation by peaceful and constitutional means, but not by rebellion and civil war.
Such are the corrections we think are demanded, not of our institutions, but of popular opinion. Let public opinion conform, on the one hand, to our institutions, and, on the other, to the loyal and conservative practice of the people who have volunteered to defend the government, assert the majesty of law, and to save the life and integrity of the nation. We ask no more. These corrections, we trust, the southern rebellion and the civil war which has clothed with mourning almost every family in the Union will induce as to make. The minds and hearts of the people are now open to serious thought and to wise counsels. They are prepared to review the past, and to take a wise and fresh start for the future.

                                                                      WHAT THE REBELLION TEACHES.

 

                                                                  [From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1862.]

Dr. Keogh, the able and loyal editor of the Pittsburg Catholic, has in his popular lecture before the Catholic Institute of Cincinnati, given a very condensed, clear, explicit and just statement of the Catholic principles of government as taught by the greatest and most approved fathers and doctors of the church. To those familiar with the writings of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmine, and Suarez his statement contains indeed little that is new, but it presents their doctrine in a popular form, and applies it to the great struggles now raging between legitimate anthority and revolutionism both at home and abroad. His lecture, which we should be glad  to see widely circulated, is timely, and brings out and enforces certain great principles of which the people, whether orthodox or heterodox, cannot be too frequently reminded, and with which they cannot be too thoroughly imbued,-principles which, had been more generally held and more generally understood, would have saved Europe from revoluntionary terrorism, and our own country from the fearful evils of the civil war, with which she is now so sorely afflicted. 

Men who pique themselves on being "practical men," men of "plain common sense," are apt to treat with contempt those of us who deal with principles, and labor to establish sound and just doctrines; but all experience proves that the people collectively as well as individually are logical, and sure, sooner or later, to draw from their premises their logical conclusion. If they start with false theory of authority, they are cetain to fetch up in despotism, and, if with a false theory of liberty, they are just as certain to fetch up in revolutionism, anarchy, or license. A false theory respecting the divine orgin of power has led nation after nation to submit to the misrule and oppression of despots, and a false theory as to popular sovereignty subjects all European society to the terror of revolutionism, and in this country leads to rebellion, secession, and civil war. The doctrine of popular sovereignty held and proclaimed  by our American press, both North and South, fully justifies secession, and condemns the federal government for its attempt to coerce the rebellious states into submission. If the people are sovereign, and government is nothing but an agency, created by them for carrying out their will, as modern demagogy teaches, by what right do you deny the people of the slaveholding states the right to secede from the Union, and to form a southern confederacy, if such be their pleasure? Either the theory which you have insisted on in the case of all foreign revolutions is untenable, and should be promptly disavowed, or you are wrong in attempting to enforce the laws of the Union over states that do not choose to obey them. If the Emilian provinces had the right to secede from the papal authority, and annex themselves to Peidmont, why has not South Carolina the right to secede from the Union, and enter into the southern confederacy? Yet there are men, that hailed the secession of the Emilian provinces as glorious assertion of freedom, who are now fighting against South Carolina, and willing to see her annihilated. There are men amongst us, men who applaud to the echo Garibaldi, that prince of freebooters, laud him as a patriot and a hero, who yet demand the capture and execution of Jefferson Davis as a traitor. It is said that even our government actually invited Garibaldi to accept a commin ssion in our army, and there was at one time a report that he was to be its commander-in-chief, -he, a man not worthy to be named in the same breath with even Jefferson Davis, John B. Floyd, or Gideon Pillow!

It is of the last importance that we start with sound and just primciples. It is absurd to claim the right to resist government, if it governs by divine right, or to undertake to suppress a rebellion, if the people are above law, and absolutely and persistently sovereign, as our demagogues assert. In either case the inconsistency is too great to be permanently successful. We ourselves support the government, because we belive in government, and do not believe in the deemagogical doctrine of popular sovereignty. We love both liberty and authority, and believe in the possibility of neither without the other. We opposed the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849; we opposed the revolution that reestablished the Napoleonic dynasty in 1852, the revoluntionary campaign of the French in Italy in 1859, and have opposed all the Italian revolutions for which it prepared the way, and which it stirred up. We condemned the secession of the Emilian provinces from the papal authority, and the annexation of the duchies to the Sard Kingdom. We justified the attempt of the sovereigm of Rome to reduce his emperor of Austria in his efforts to save his empire from dismemberment. We are perfectly consistent, therefore, in denying the right of southern secession, and in sustaining the federal government in the use of force for coercing the rebellious states into submission, and in putting forth its full strength to presetve the Union, and save the life and integrity of the nation. We should have been equally false to out country and to our principles had we not done so. 

We may be told here in answer to our boast of consistency, that we, also, defended the cause of Italian Unity, and recommended the union of all Italy under the sceptre of the house of Savoy. Be it so. We desired and desire Italian unity; we wish Italy to be a united Italy, embracing under a wise, just, and honorable constitutional government the whole peninsula, as a desideratum in European politics. But we were never willing, and are not now willing, to see it effected by revolutionary or despotic violence. We never were willing to encourage secession or invasion as the means of effecting it, thought, if effected by such means, we maintained, and still dare maintain, that, when effected, it would be wiser to accept it, as un fait accompli, acquiesce in it, and make the best terms possible with it, than to make unavailing attempts to restores the old order of things. This is all that can be said agianst us, and this much we can maintain in perfect consistency with out principles, even if it be an error of judgment. 

Moreover, the reasons which make us wish the unity of Italy, lead us to oppose the sidintergration of the American Union. This is the epoch of great states, great powers, as they are called, and small states or powers stand a poor chance of existence, and still a poorer chance of independence. The great powers manage the politics of the world as suits themselces, or, as they can best agree among themselves. Since the popes have ceased to be at the head of the political system of Europe, the division of Italy into a number of petty states has deprived her political influence, and reduced her to a "geographical expression." We would see, if the thing be practiable (of which we have out doubts, as things go), a united, independent, constitutional Italy, as one of the great powers of Europe. Such an Italy is neccessary to keep up the equilibrium between Catholic and non-Catholic Europe, and to secure the balance of power in the Old World. We would preserve the American Union in order to preserve the American state as one of the great states or powers of the world, and to insure to the New World her proper rank and political influence. We oppose the disintergration of the Union, becuase its disintegreation would reduce America to a mere goegraphical expression and compel the people of this continent to follow the politics and submit to the will or caprice of the great powers of the Old World. We want the United States to remain a great power, so that it may compel respect to its rights and interests, and give weight to its views and wishes in the politics of the European states. We do not want to see our great republic reduced to the rank of a second or third power. Our political principles and out patriotism alike make us wish that it should, at least, preserve its rank and its power. So, under any and every point of view, we are consistent with ourselves in opposing secession, and seeking to preserve the life and integrity and integrity of the republic. 

Secession itself is another illustration of the importance of theory. Secession is only a logical deduction from the theory of state sovereignty, which has been favored to some extent almost from the formation of the federal government, and in the North as well as in the South, and alternately by all parties. Patrick Henry, of Virginia, and Samuel Adams, of Massachusetts, oppsed the federal consitiution on the ground that it created a national government, and they wanted only a confederacy of congress of sovereign states. Mr. Jefferson inclined to the view that the stares retained their sovereignty even after the adoption of the constitution. Such was the dominant view of Republican, came into power with Mr. Jefferson in 1801, and it has always been the doctrine, or at least the doctrinal tendency, of the so-called Democratic party. President Jackson opposed it when asserted and acted on by South Carolina, and favored it in the adjoining state of Georgia, whose nullification of a judgement of the supreme court was no less reprehensible than South Carolina's nulliflcation of an act of congress. The New-England states, excepting Vermont, all but ruined by the war forced on the country by the southern and middle states, resorted to it in 1812, and threatened to secede from the Union. The doctrine has been lurking in the American mind from the first, and the section that felt itself aggrieved has always more or less boldly assumed it. South Carolina did little more in 1831, than Massachusetts talked of doing in 1814. If we suppose that the states entered the Union as sovereigns, and that each remains after the union a sovereign state, it will be hard to say that any state has not the inherent right to secede, when she judges it for her interest to do so; and equally hard to say, that, if she do judges and secedes, the remaining states have the right to use force to compel her to return to the Union.  Moreover, if she remains a sovereign state, she can, by revoking her act of accession to the Union, absolve all her citizens from their allegiance to the Untied Sates, and require them to take the oath of allegiance to herself. You have no right to call seceders or the confederates rebels, or to treat them as rebels or traitors, if you concede their doctrine of state sovereignty, In fact, there are few, if any, among them who reagrd themselves as traitors or rebels, in their view of the case, they are as loyal and as patriotic as we are in ours.

Let no man mistake us. We are not justifying the southern rebellion. The whole country knows on which side we are, and that according to our ability and in our own narrow sphere no man had done or sacrificed more than we for the sake of the Union. We hold secession to be rebellion; be we can do so only on condition that we reject the theory of state sovereignty on which they act, and which has recieved too much countenance in all parts of the Union. The fact that a theory which justifies them, or would justify them if true, has been widely entertained, and entertained by men of eminence, whose loyalty and patioitism are not to be questioned, may have, and, perhaps, should have, some weight with us in moderating our personal feelings toward them, and even in mitigrating the punishment we may deem it necessary to inflict on them when the rebellion has been suppressed. But not for this do we state it. We state it for the purpose of indicating the danger of false theories, and to rebuke those self-complacent men who are so ready to denounce as vain "theorizers" and "abstactionists" those who call attentionto the first principel, and seek to establish a sound political philosophy. We have, not all of us, but large numbers of us, cherished two false principles, one in relation to government in general, and the other in realtionto the federal government in particular, - principles which we find in this hour of trial we cannot act on, without giving up all government, and suffering the Union to fall to pieces as a rope of sand. The blood and treasure which are so freely poured out by the loyal states in defence of the authority of the government and the inegrity of the nation, are the earnest and practical protest of a great and free people against the demagogical interpretation of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the disintegrating doctrine of state sovereignty, and titis to be hoped that the war when it closes will have corrected both, the one as gatal to gvernment itselg, and the other as fatal to national unity and integrity. 

We love our form of government; we want no alterations in the federal constitution, and very few in any of the several state constitutions. We are republican, heart and soul, and far more so than we were before the rebellion broke out. We have had out confidence in popular government incalculably increased by the experience of the last twelve months. The strength and energy put forth by the United States, the mighty army we have been able, within a year, to collect, arm and equip, discipline and place in the field; the large and effcient navy we have been able to create and place on our coats and mighty rivers, the respectable efficiency of both branches of the service, and the orderly behaviors, patience, endurance, and bravery of both our land and naval forces, have, we confess, astonished us, made us proud of our country and proud of our counrty men. A people so long engaged in peaceful pursuits, so long in the enjoyment of peace as to have almost lost the tradition as well as the experience of war, without military organization, without armies, ships, arms, or stores, sending more than a half a million of soldiers to the field, and creating, arming, and equipping and effcient navy of two or three hundred ships-of-war, in so brief a time, may well be called a great people. Blunders there may have been, arising from inexperience; traitors there may have been in and out of office to embarrass our measures, and impede our operations; and much narrow-mindness and ineffciency there may also have been; but after all we have shown an aptitude, and energy, and strength, unsurpassed by any other people in the history of the world. No, this civil war, whether it terminate in a few months, or whether it linger for a dozen years, has for ever settled the question in favor of free government, and rendered the old arguments against it obsolete. It has proved that, if the republic had been united in a war agianst foreign enemies, it would have been invincible agianst all Europe, for we count as ours, as American, the skill, the energy, and the strength shown by the rebels themselves.

Universal suffrage, which, we own, we had come to distrust, has vindicated itself, and the people have proved that they are capable of self-government, and can dispense with both kings and nobles. Even our liberal naturalization laws, and our open hospitality to foreigners, which we with many others feared might prove dangerous to our American orderof civilization, have been justified, and Know-nothingism has lost its last advocate. In the war natural-born and naturalized citizens have fought with equal bravery and devotion side by side. German, Irish, French, Italian born citizens have proved themselves loyal Americans, have been not the last to rush in where blows fall thickest and fall heaviest, and have contributed their full share to the victories we have won, and to the glory of our arms. All are Americans by loyalty, by common hardships, by common dangers, and by common deeds. They who have mingled their blood on the same battle-field, in defence of the same noble cause, must henceforth be, and be treated, as brothers. The war has made or is making us one people, and has removed or is removing more than one of the old causes of division. No American can forget that chiefly to the sturdy Germans of the West we owe it that the great state of Missouri did not follow her sister slave states into secession, or that in the very darkest hour, when even stout hearts failed, the brave and impulsive Irish were foremost to volunteer in the armies of the republic. No American can ever forget that full one-third of the forces that have won our victories, and saved the life and integrity of the nation were not born on American soil. Disloyal as have been many of those who belong to our own church, and as absurd as are the prejudices of many of our brethren agianst New England, no loyal Protesant can ever forget that in the nation's struggle for life Catholics have sent to the field both in officers and men far more than their proportion. The proportion of Catholics in the army is probably more than double the proportion which Catholics bear to the whole populaion of the country. After this no sane American can ever countenancean anti-foreign, or an anti-Catholic party in politics. Foreign-born citizens have sealed their naturalization with their blood, and Catholics have vindicated their right to civil and political equality in everydefeat that has been suffered, and in every victory that has been won. No blood has flowed more freely or in richer torrents than theirs, and the non-catholic who forgets it is not worthy the name of American, and should undergo the old Anglo-Saxon punishment of being branded nidering,-infamous. 

We own, and are glad to own, that the war has corrected many of our own prejudices, and relieved many of our fears; it has given us full confidence in the strength and durability of our institutions. It has, also, corrected many errors the popular mind had imbibed, and exploded more than one popular fallacy. It has proved the necessity of upholding the legitimate authority of government, and therefore refuted the notion that government is a mere agency, with no power, in case of need, to coerce obedience to law are as necessary, and as indispensable as in monarchical states. It has refuted the popular theories of revolutionists so rife in our times, and proved the necessity of conservative principles, and respect for established authority. Happily the war came in season to arrest our wild readicalism, before the heart of our people become wholly corrupt, and before they had become as base as the theories of their demagogues. The rebellion has shown, also, that the Union can be saved only by rejecting the interoretation of the constitution that makes the United States a mere congress of sovereigns, and by adopting and adhering to the doctrine that assumes them to be a nation, a real state, one and indivisible. The people in the loyal states have acted right in the present struggle, but they have done so only in opposition to opinions and theories which had grained great credit in all sections of the country. The doctrines that there is a sacred right of revolution, and that a state cannot be coerced, gave the rebellion every advantage under the inbecile Buchanan, enabled it to mature itself without resistance, and to make openly all the preparations supposed to be necessary to secure its success, and paralyzed for months the avtivity and strength of the present administration. Even stanch Republicans shook before these doctrines, and many of our ablest statesmen and truest patriots feared to grapple with the danger, and talked of "compromise," some even thought we must let the seceding states go. It was doubtful how far the administration could count on the support of the free states themselves in an attempt to put down the rebelion by force of arms. If patriotism had not triumphed over theory, and if the people had not felt it more urgent to maintain the integrity of the nation than to carry out the speculations of their demagogues, the administration would have been unable to collect force enough to defend for a single day the national capital. The danger was far greater than has been told, and, perhaps, than ever will be told. The rebellion is crushed, or is sure to be crushed, if no foreign power intercenes, because the northern Democratic leaders rose above their doctrines, and refused to fulfil the expections of their southern brethern, who counted on them as friends and allies. The rebellion has proved that the doctrines we refer to are, as far as they could go, incompatible with the stability of government, and especially with the maintenance of the life and integrity of the nation, and therefore that they are false and dangerous, and to be abandoned in speculation as we have been forced to abandon them in practice. The war, we hope, will have the effect to conform our theories to the practice which all loyal men now see to be just and necessary, and which the people have so generously and heroically adopted. 

The principles of government which are as necessary under a republican as under any other form of government, requrie us to distinguish between the power, and the person or persons invested with it. THe power comes from God, for, as says the apostle, non est potestas, nisi a Deo; but being from God, it is necessarily a trust, not an absolute, inherent right. Here is the real distinction between legitimate authority and caesarism; liberty and depotism. The prejudice against the divine orgin of power grows out of the failure to make this destinction, and of assuming that the assertion of the power, or authority, as from God, means that God has given to certain individuals or certain families, the indefeasible right to govern, an inalienable and inadmissble right, which cannot, whatecer the character of the ruler or the intolerable tyranny of his government, be reruler or the intolerbale tyranny of his government, be resisted with out impiety, and rebellion agianst God, the doctrine known in history as the "divine right of kings and passive obedience." This doctrine makes the prince the living law, according to the maxim of the old Roman jurist, Quod placuit principi, id legis habet vigorem. This is what we call caesarism, and oppose as despotism, which is destructive alike of the best interests of socitey and the true dignity of man. It lies at the basis of the old Roman imperialism, under which the emperpor was the living law and worshipped as a divinity. Even the Christian and orthodox Emperor Theodosius was addressed by his subjects as "your eterinty." This doctrine was revived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in England lost the Stuarts their throne, and in France provoked the old French revolution, while it reduced Spain from the formost power of Europe to a third-rate state, and Italy to "a geographical expression." No sane man, who knows aught of liberty, can for one moment countenance the divine origin of government in the sense of this doctrine. 

To get rid of "the divine right of kings and passive obedicence," the friends of freedom went to the opposite extreme, asserted the popular origin of power, and made the people in their own native right and might the living law. These made the people Caesar, the popular will the law, and asserted as a maxium, Vox populi vox Dei, or Quod placeuit populo, id legis habet vigorem, and therefore in principle as absolute a despotism as that asserted by the caesarists they warred agianst. This is the condemnation of modern philosophical democracy, as defended by Mazzini and his friends, who do not hesitate to clothe the people with all the attributes claimed by the old imperialists for the emperor, and to say not only "people-prince," "people-king," but "people-priest," and "people-god." It is in the name of this "people-divinity" that democratic revolutions in Europe, of late years, have been commenced, and of which Garibaldi is the soldier, and Mazzini is the prophet. Mazzini is the Mahomet and Garbaldi the Kaled of this new worship, a political imposture, for withstanding which any amount of abuse has been heaped on Pio Nono, Francis Joseph, and the young king of Naples. It is this political theory, called by us European democracy, and which like all the vices of the Old World, has of late years found its way to our counrty, that we for nearly twenty years have been battling with out best ability, and holding up to our readers as wholly incompatible with American republicanism American democracy, which, to avoid confusion, we call republicanism, has and can have no affinity with this European democracy, and can no more be reconciled with it than Christianity can be reconciled with demon-worship.

The true theory of the orgin of government is dialectic, and harmonizes these two extremes. The power, the right, or the authority if from God, who says "By me kinds reign, and lawgivers decree just things," but who shall be the depositary of the power, exercise the trust, is a matter determinable by the people themselves. The power comes from God, but comes to the prince or government through the people. Since the power comes from God, it comes from a source above all people, and they neither individually nor collectively have any right to resist it, and are bound in conscience to repsect and obey it. The law of God settles the authority or right of government, and the people settle the questionwho shall be governors, or who shall exercise the power. When the people have settled the form of the government, and have legally chosen their rulers, these rulers, within the linits and conditions fixed by the constitution, have the divine right to gobern, do govern by authority of God, and the people individually and collectively are bound to obey them, not as the ministers of their will, but as ministers of the divine will, and therefore obedience is due them in conscience, and disobedience is not only a crime against society, but a sin agianst God.This princeiple gives authority and stability to government, for it gives it the right to wield the sword, to punish evil doers and to enforce obedience to its acts, whileit denies all right of resistance, and binds all subjects in conscience to obedience. It also secures freedom by making the power a trust, and placing in the hands of the people the right to determine who shall and who shall not be vested with it.

The theory of "the divine right of kinds and passive obedience," the caesarist theory, as ecpounded by James I. of England, Louis XIV. of France, Phillip II. of Spain, and the great Bossuet, does not deny that the monarch is responsible to God for the use he may make of his power, or that God will punish him, here or hereafter, in his own person or in his descendants, for any injustice, tryanny, or oppression of which he may be quilty, but it denies that he is resion of which he may be quilty, but it denies that he is responsible to nation ot justiciable by the people. It, consequently, denies to the nation or the people all right of resistance, not simply to legitimate authority, but to tyranny and oppression, and leaves them without any right to demand, and, if neccessary, to effect by force a redress of grivances. It, therefore, covers the oppressor with the aegis of religion, and renders oppresion sacred and inviolable. The other theory, European democratic theory, makes the personsinvested with authority responsible indeed, but to the poeple alone, and asserts for the people the right to resist their rulersat any time, in any way, and for any reason the please. It divests government of all moral sanction, deprives obediecnce of all religious obligation, and makes civil obedience a mere question of expediency, and results necessarily in mobocracy, to use a barbarous term, anarchy, or the despotism of the majority. The dialectic theory we adopt makes rulers responsible to God, as all men are, and also to the nation, or to the people. To the people, because they receive their investiture from them, and to God, because the power with which they are clothed is from him, and remains his. What is essential to the existence and maintenance of government, the essential and necessary rights of authority under any and every form of government, are from God, held and exercised by divine right, independently of all popular conventions or popular will.These are the divine or natural rights of government in that it is government. The people may say who shall or shall not be intrusted with the exercise of these rights, bat the rights themselves are determined by the very nature of civil society, and depend on the eternal reason or will of the Creator. No popular conventions, however called or constituted, can create them, or rightly abridge them. They rest on the same basis with the rights of man,—rights held from the Almighty in the very constitution of our manhood. All Americans hold the natural rights of man sacred and inviolable; the essential rights, we would say, the natural rights, of civil society should be held equally sacred and inviolable, for they are equally from God. IJet our countrymen so hold, and they will hold what we assert in asserting that the power is from God.

What we wish here to assert is that the power is not conventional, nor of popular, nor indeed of human institution,

therefore that it can never be justly resisted by the people either collectively or individually, and that it has the right to command, and the right to use all the force necessary to maintain itself, to suppress all opposition and to make its commands obeyed, however large or small the party opposing it. Even in constituting the government the people have no right to deny it any of its essential or natural rights, or to restrict power beyond the limits of the divine charter. Any clause in the constitution doing this mnst be treated as null and void, as repugnant to natural right, to the necessary and essential authority of civil society. In other words, there is a higher law than the will of the people,—the original divine law of civil society. The government while obeying this law, without which it would not and could not be government, and keeping within the limits of its conventional restrictions, is legitimate, sacred, and inviolable, and cannot, as we have said, be resisted without crime against the state, and sin against God, since natural law is divine law. This, as we have said, secures the stability and authority of government, by limiting the power of the people over it, and denying the right of popular resistance to it so long as it simply discharges its legitimate functions and does not transgress its legitimate bounds. Yet it by no means demands passive obedience to the tyrant, or forbids popular resistance to wrong and oppression, or what was formerly understood by the right of revolution, for the oppressor or the tyrant forfeits to the people the power that comes from God.

In the modern sense, as now understood by European revolutionists, the right of revolution cannot be asserted, for it denies the right of government. Formerly the right of revolution meant simply the right to resist and overthrow tyranny. This right no lover of freedom can question. A government that abuses and persists in abusing its trusts, that plays the tyrant, that perverts power from the common good, or the good of the community, that makes it a burden and a curse instead of a common benefit, and obstinately persists in so doing, forfeits its rights, loses its authority, becomes a usurper, and therefore may be justly resisted, and made to give place to another, because in resisting it there is no resistance to the power that comes from God. The tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance. All that comes from God is dialectic, and his grants cannot contradict one another. His patent of the rights of man to the individual is in harmony with his patent of authority to civil society, and he can give no power of government to society incompatible with the rights he gives to the individual. When the individual uses the rights of man in a sense incompatible with the rights of authority, he Hits, and society may set him right; so when the government uses its power in a sense incompatible with the rights of man, it transcends its authority, and may be corrected by the people. The right of revolution in this sense we assert. But the right of revolution seems to us, as popularly understood at present, to mean the right to overthrow any existing government even by violence and bloodshed whenever the people, or a portion of them numerous or strong enough to do it, choose to attempt it, simply for the sake of introducing another and as they believe a better political organization, although no act of tyranny or oppression can be alleged against it. In this sense we deny the right of revolution, as incompatible with the very idea of government.

One government may be more wisely constituted than another, and it often happens that the growth and prosperity of a nation demand grave changes in the constitutional law; but if the government is honestly administered according to the existing constitution, and its administrators take care to usurp no power, we deny the right of the people to seek even a desirable change by revolutionary violence. In such a case the remedy is reform, not revolution,—reform brought about by peaceful, not violent measures, by the cooperation of authority, secured by the force of public opinion. The right of resistance must not be confounded with the present sense of the word revolution. The right of resistance to tyranny is a sacred and divine right, as sacred and divine as the right of legitimate government itself; the right of revolution as the word is now used has no existence, and revolution is not and cannot be justifiable.

The power in the case of the federal government, as in that of all other governments, comes from God through the people, but through the people acting as political communities, not simply as population. These political communities or states are the successors or continnators of the English colonies created by the British crown, or under the sovereignty of Great Britain, and therefore, though political communities or bodies politic and corporate, and since the revolution no longer colonies, they are not complete or sovereign states. The sovereignty previously in the British crown or in the mother country was not assumed or exercised by the colonies severally, and on becoming independent of Great Britain they did not each for itselt succeed to her sovereignty, or to any more power than they had possessed sis colonies. Tlmt is, the mother country was succeeded not by the states severally, but by the United States. The United States as one political people. took the place in the new order introduced by the revolution previously held by the mother country, and therefore became in their unity the inheritor of her sovereignty. The revolution simply transferred the sovereignty from Great Britain to the United States. Hence, under the old confederation and even after the adoption of the federal constitution, some of the states continued to act under the colonial charters granted by the British crown. The states, have, as had the colonies, certain civil and political rights, but never at any moment have they held or claimed the full rights of sovereignty. As colonies the sovereignty was in Great Britain or the British crown; under the confederation the sovereignty was claimed, possessed, and exercised not by the states separately, but by the United States, as it is under the federal constitution.

We will not say that, if the several Anglo-American colonies had each in its individual capacity asserted and maintained its independence, it would not have become on its successful assertion of its independence a free sovereign state possessed ofthe full rights of sovereignty, and the Union formed between them been a congress or league of sovereigns, a union of the nature of the Zollverein formed by the northern states of Germany. But such was not the fact. The independence was declared by the united colonies, which by this fact became united states. The articles of confederation were drawn up by the united states, and the new political power recognized and treated with by foreign nations, and finally acknowledged by Great Britain, was not thirteen independent powers or sovereignties, but one power, one national sovereignty, called the United States of America. The people of the United States have, therefore, always been and are one political people, and have never existed as separate, independent, and sovereign states. Under the colonial regime the political unity was in the British crown; under the confederation it was in the United States, and it is in the United States under the federal constitution, and where is lodged the unity, there is lodged the sovereignty of a nation.

Nor will we say that there were in transferring the sovereignty from the British crown to the United States no irregularities, no isolated acts incompatible with the doctrine we advocate. Revolutionary times are seldom remarkable for their order and regularity. But what is disorderly, irregular, or anomalous in those times establishes no precedent, and forms no rule of interpretation. With the exception of Vermont and Texas, not included in the original "Thirteen," no state in this Union has ever existed as an independent sovereign state. None of them has ever been recognized as a sovereign power by any foreign state, ever exercised the functions of a sovereign power, ever entered into relations with foreign powers, negotiated foreign treaties, or had the right to make war or peace. The supreme attributes of sovereignty they have never as a fact possessed, exercised, or, until recently, claimed. Foreign nations have known and now know only the United States. All our foreign treaties are negotiated by and with the United States; the only flag floating from ships of war or commerce, known on the ocean, or in foreign ports is the United States flag; the United States make war and peace, enter into and discharge national obligations, acquire and hold national territory by purchase or conquest, and stand recognized and respected by all the nations of the earth as an independent sovereign nation. None of the several states, excepting Vermont and Texas, have ever been so recognized, performed any of these functions, or sustained any of these relations; and the exception in the case of Vermont and Texas amounts to nothing, for in the Union they stand on the same footing with the original states. The states have never exercised the rights of sovereignty, and have remained political and independent communities only in the sense in which they were such communities when colonies under the crown of Great Britain. They hold their civil and political rights now, as when they were colonies, in subordination to the national sovereign.

We know there were differences of opinion at the epoch of the formation of the federal constitution, that some patriots wished to reserve a larger and others a smaller sphere of action to the states, and some wished, it is probable, to make the Union simply a congress of sovereigns. There are, no doubt, in the constitution traces of these differences of opinions and wishes; but it is clear that the convention of 1787 intended to frame, and regarded themselves as framing a constitution of a national government, a constitution for one political people, and the few phrases or even provisions that smack of the state sovereignty theory were inserted or suffered to remain so as to escape the danger of having the constitution rejected by any one of the states. The convention were content to secure the substance of nationality, without pushing the state sovereignty men to the wall. They effected their object, though not without some ambiguity of language, and leaving a chance for cavillers and pettifoggers.

The fact that the constitution was formed by a convention of the people as states, and that the constitution was ratified by the states, or conventions of the people of the several states, has led even some who assert the national character of the government to suppose the constitution emanated from the states severally, and not from the people of the United States, and that the American people became one political people only by virtue of the constitution. This, we believe, was Mr.Webster's doctrine. But this is contradicted by the very preamble of the constitution itself, which says, "We the people of the United States,"—not we the people of the several states,—" do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." The people of the United States are not created by the constitution, for they precede it, and ordain and establish- it. Our own former error on the subject grew out of supposing the states succeeded severally not onlyto the rights of the colonies under the British crown, but to the sovereignty possessed by that crown itself. This was a mistake. The sovereignty of the crown did not fall to the states severally, but to the United States, and therefore after independence, as before, the states severally were subordinate, not sovereign political communities, and the people of the United States were one political people with a single national sovereign. This, if we are not mistaken, is substantially the doctrine held by John Quincy Adams, no mean authority in questions of this sort.

Art. X. of the amendments has been adduced in defence of a doctrine opposite to the one we are defending. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Hence it has been argued that the powers of the United States are powers delegated to it by the states, and that all the powers of government not so delegated are reserved to the states severally, or to the people, not of the United States, but of the several states. But this inference is not necessary, and the amendment, though undoubtedly intended as a constitutional guaranty of the reserved rights of the several states, says nothing in favor of state sovereignty. It asserts indeed that the federal government is a government of delegated and limited powers, bnt it does not assert that the United States are created by state delegation, or that the political people called the United States have only delegated and limited powers. In the amendment the term United Stale* must he taken in the sense of the government created or perfected by the constitution. The federal government has only delegated powers, but the powers are delegated by the people of the united, not the several states. It is a government of limited powers, because the people so willed, not because the powers of the people of the United States are limited by the rights of the people of the several states. The reservation, again, is to the states respectively, or to the people. But what people? The article does not say, to the people of the states respectively, or the people of the states severally, and therefore we must understand them to be the people of the United States, the very people assembled in convention to constitute the national government.

There is nothing in our view of the unity and sovereignty of the people of the United States to interfere with the federal element of our government. The states severally were never complete, that is, sovereign states, for, as we have seen, the British sovereignty over the colonies did not fall to the states severally, but to the states united, or, the United States. But the colonies, though created at different dates and differently constituted, had by royal grant, charter, or custom, certain political and civil rights, which they retained after independence. These rights rendered uniform in all the states, enlarged in some respects and abridged in others by the federal constitution, are in their substance and in their tenure anterior to that constitution, and are what we called the reserved rights of the states, that is to say, rights which the United States willed should be reserved and guarantied to the states severally. These rights, even as colonial rights, were rights the sovereign was bound to treat as sacred and inviolable, and it was for his alleged violation of them his sovereignty was abjured, and independence declared. Even under the British crown the colonies within the sphere of their rights were legally free and independent political communities. They remain so under the sovereignty of the United States, and the federal government is bound to treat those rights as sacred and inviolable. They are recognized and guarantied by the constitution.

But we may remark that, after all, these rights were not original in the colonies as civil society, and could not be defended by them as their natural rights of government. They were rights held by them as British colonies and as British subjects, and were therefore of the nature of franchises, of chartered, or of vested rights. They were sacred and inviolable only so long as they who held them observed the conditions expressed or implied in the grant. They could be forfeited as all such rights may be forfeited, and the king might issue his writ quo warranto against any one of the colonies, and, on evidence of forfeiture, revoke the charter, as in several cases was actually done. The United States holds substantially the relation to the several states held by the British crown to the Anglo-American colonies. The rights of the several states are the rights of those colonies, and are held by them as American states and American citizens, not as original, independent, and sovereign states. As long as the express or implied conditions of their charter or tenure are complied with, they are sacred and inviolable, and within their sphere the states are independent of the national government, and of one another. But if they break these conditions, if they cease to be American states, and their people to be citizens of the United States, they forfeit their liberties, and the United States as sovereign has the right to revoke their charters, or annul their state constitutions, and enter upon their possession as upon any other forfeited estate. The state by its own act has lapsed, and the sovereign only resumes what is his own. Hence Mr. Sumner was right in declaring state secession state suicide, as we proved by a slightly different line of argument in our last Review.

The right of a state to resist the federal government, in case it becomes tyrannical and oppressive, is precisely the right, neither greater nor less, of individuals to do the same, and what that is, has been already stated. So long as the federal government keeps within its constitutional powers, it governs by divine right, and no state or individual has any moral or political right to resist it. If the free and fair exercise of its legitimate powers bears unequally upon different sections, changes or reforms may be sought, but only in a constitutional way, and by peaceful means. 'No violence, no insurrection, no rebellion, no armed resistance is lawful. The condemnation of the southern seceders is that they have resisted the federal government in the exercise of its legitimate powers, without having a single act of tyranny or in contravention of the constitution to allege against it. And they could not have such act without condemning themselves, for they have controlled the federal administration, and shaped its policy for more than three-fourths of the time since the organization of the government. For the twenty-four years next preceding the present administration they had every thing pretty much their own way, and if any portion of the people had any right to complain, it was not the people of the slave states. No doubt the abolitionists said and printed many things annoying to them, and some of the free states passed laws not acceptable to them; but the people of the free states had to complain of laws far more objectionable passed by them, and of numerous and gross outrages upon their citizens at the South, such as imprisonment, expulsion, lynching, tar-and-feathering, and hanging, for which no redress could be obtained. Yet the federal government, while it suffered unrebuked southern outrages upon northern citizens, was never restrained by the personal-liberty laws, and executed its own laws faithfully as far as the North was concerned. The South really had no grievance to complain of from the government, and the seceding states have never had a shadow of excuse for their rebellion. If the southern "chivalry " disliked being yoked with northern " mudsills," they were free to seek a separation by peaceful and constitutional means, but not by rebellion and civil war.

Such are the corrections we think are demanded, not of our institutions, but of popular opinion. Let public opinion conform, on the one hand, to our institutions, and, on the other, to the loyal and conservative practice of the people who have volunteered to defend the government, assert the majesty of law, and to save the life and integrity of the nation. We ask no more. These corrections, we trust, the southern rebellion and the civil war which has clothed with mourning almost every family in the Union will induce as to make. The minds and hearts of the people are now open to serious thought and to wise counsels. They are prepared to review the past, and to take a wise and fresh start for the future.