第48章

Political propagandism, except on the Roman plan, that is, by annexation and incorporation, is as impracticable as it is wanting in the respect that one independent people owes to another.The old French Jacobins tried to propagate, even with fire and sword, their system throughout Europe, as the only system compatible with the rights of man.The English, since , have been great political propagandists, and at one time it seemed not unlikely that every European state would try the experiment of a parliamentary government, composed of an hereditary crown, an hereditary house of lords, and an elective house of commons.The democratic Americans are also great political propagandists, and are ready to sympathize with any rebellion, insurrection, or movement in behalf of democracy in any part of the world, however mean or contemptible, fierce or bloody it may be; but all this is as unstatesmanlike as unjust;unstatesmanlike, for no form of government can bear transplanting, and because every independent nation is the sole judge of what best comports with its own interests, and its judgment is to be respected by the citizens as well as by the governments of other states.Religious propagandism is a right and a duty, because religion is catholic and of universal obligation; and so is the jus gentium of the Romans, which is only the application to individuals and nations of the great principles of natural justice; but no political propagandism is ever allowable, because no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.

Thoughtful Americans are opposed to political propagandism, and respect the right of every nation to choose its own form of government; but they hold that the American system is the best in itself, and that if other nations were as enlightened as the American, they would adopt it.But though the American system, rightly understood, is the best, as they hold, it is not because other nations are less enlightened, which is by no means a fact, that they do not adopt, or cannot bear it, but solely because their providential constitutions do not require or admit it, and an attempt to introduce it in any of them would prove a failure and a grave evil.

Fit your shoes to your feet.The law of the governmental constitution is in that of the nation.The constitution of the government must grow out of the constitution of the state, and accord with the genius, the character, the habits, customs, and wants of the people, or it will not work well, or tend to secure the legitimate ends of government.The constitutions imagined by philosophers are for Utopia, not for any actual, living, breathing people.You must take the state as it is, and develop your governmental constitution from it, and harmonize it with it.

Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, the government has no support in the state, in the organic people, or nation, and can sustain itself only by corruption or physical force.A government may be under the necessity of using force to suppress an insurrection or rebellion against the national authority, or the integrity of the national territory, but no government that can sustain itself, not the state, only by physical force or large standing armies, can be a good government, or suited to the nation.It must adopt the most stringent repressive measures, suppress liberty of speech and of conscience, outrage liberty in what it has the most intimate and sacred, and practise the most revolting violence and cruelty, for it can govern only by terror.Such a government is unsuited to the nation.

This is seen in all history: in the attempt of the dictator Sulla to preserve the old patrician government against the plebeian power that time and events had developed in the Roman state, and which was about to gain the supremacy, as we have seen, at Pharsalia, Philippi, and Actium; in the efforts to establish a Jacobinical government in France in ; in Rome in , and the government of Victor Emmanuel in Naples in and .

These efforts, proscriptions, confiscations, military executions, assassinations, massacres, are all made in the name of liberty, or in defence of a government supposed to guaranty the well-being of the state and the rights of the people.They are rendered inevitable by the mad attempt to force on a nation a constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, or repugnant to the national tastes, interests, habits, convictions, or whole interior life.The repressive policy, adopted to a certain extent by nearly all European governments, grows out of the madness of a portion of the people of the several states in seeking to force upon the nation an anti-national constitution.