The plebiscitum, which is simply an appeal to the people outside of government, is not valid when the government has not lapsed, either by its usurpations or by its dissolution, nor is it valid either in the case of a province, or of a population that has no organic existence as an independent sovereign state.The plebiscitum in France was valid, but in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Modena, Parma, and Lucca, and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies it was not valid, for their legal governments had not lapsed; nor was it valid in the Aemilian provinces of the Papal States, because they were not a nation or a sovereign people, but only a portion of such nation or people.
In the case of the states and provinces--except Lombardy, ceded to France by Austria, and sold to the Sardinian king--annexed to Piedmont to form the new kingdom of Italy, the plebiscitum was invalid, because implying the right of the people to rebel against the legal authority, and to break the unity and individuality of the state of which they form an integral part.
The nation is a whole, and no part has the right to secede or separate, and set up a government for itself, or annex itself to another state, without the consent of the whole.The solidarity of the nation is both a fact and a law.The secessionists from the United States defended their action only on the ground that the States of the American Union are severally independent sovereign states, and they only obeyed the authority of their respective states.
The plebiscitum, or irregular appeal to what is called universal suffrage, since adopted by Louis Napoleon in France after the coup d'etat, is becoming not a little menacing to the stability of governments and the rights and integrity of states, and is not less dangerous to the peace and order of society than "the solidarity of peoples" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary, the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia has emancipated her serfs.
The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute government according to its own judgment, under any form it pleases--monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed--vest all power in an hereditary monarch, in a class or hereditary nobles, in a king and two houses of parliament, one hereditary, the other elective, or both elective; or it may establish a single, dual, or triple executive, make all officers of government hereditary or all elective, and if elective, elective for a longer or a shorter time, by universal suffrage or a select body of electors.Any of these forms and systems, and many others besides, are or may be legitimate, if established and maintained by the national will.There is nothing in the law of God or of nature, antecedently to the national will, that gives any one of them a right to the exclusion of any one of the others.
The imperial system in France is as legitimate as the federative system in the United States.The only form or system that is necessarily illegal is the despotic.That can never be a truly civilized government, nor a legitimate government, for God has given to man no dominion over man.He gave men, as St.Augustine says, and Pope St.Gregory the Great repeats, dominion over the irrational creation, not over the rational, and hence the primitive rulers of men were called pastors or shepherds, not lords.It may be the duty of the people subjected to a despotic government to demean themselves quietly and peaceably towards it, as a matter of prudence, to avoid sedition, and the evils that would necessarily follow an attempted revolution, but not because, founded as it is on mere force, it has itself any right or legality.
All other forms of government are republican in their essential constitution, founded on public right, and held under God from and for the commonwealth, and which of them is wisest and best for the commonwealth is, for the most part, an idle question.
"Forms of government," somebody has said, "are like shoes--that is the best form which best fit the feet that are to wear them."Shoes are to be fitted to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and conformation.There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from the state, no antecedent right which binds the people, for antecedently to the existence of the government as a fact, the state is free to adopt any form that it finds practicable, or judges the wisest and best for itself.
Ordinarily the form of the government practicable for a nation is determined by the peculiar providential constitution of the territorial people, and a form of government that would be practicable and good in one country may be the reverse in another.
The English government is no doubt the best practicable in Great Britain, at present at least, but it has proved a failure wherever else it has been attempted.The American system has proved itself, in spite of the recent formidable rebellion to overthrow it, the best and only practicable government for the United States, but it is impracticable everywhere else, and all attempts by any European or other American state to introduce it can end only in disaster.The imperial system apparently works well in France, but though all European states are tending to it, it would not work well at all on the American continent, certainly not until the republic of the United States has ceased to exist.While the United States remain the great American power, that system, or its kindred system, democratic centralism, can never become an American system, as Maximilian's experiment in Mexico is likely to prove.
