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and clear intellect. This being confirmed the righteous possessors in their property, and obliged the unrighteous possessors to give up what they had unjustly acquired. Thereupon the fields were distributed according to equal measure, and to every one was done even justice. Then all elected him for their chief, and yielded allegiance to him with these words: We elect thee for our chief, and we will never trespass thy ordinances. On account of this unanimous election, he is called in the Indian language Ma-ha-Ssamati-Radsha; in Thibetian, Mangboi-b Kurbai-r Gjabbo; and in Mongolian, Olana-ergukdeksen Chagran (the many-elected Monarch).”

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"In the name of the people," commenced the decree of Louis Napoleon-the first he issued after the second of December, when he had made himself master of France, and in which he called upon all the French to state whether he should have unlimited power for ten years. If it was not their will, the decree said, there was no necessity of violence, for he would then resign his power. This was naive. But theories or words, before the full assumption of imperatorial sovereignty, are of as little importance as after it. Where liberty is not a fact and a daily recurring reality, it is no liberty. The word Libertas occurs very frequently on the coins of Nero, and most frequently Fides Mutua, Liberalitas Augusta, Felicitas Publica.

Why, it may still be asked, did the Cæsars recur to the people as the source of their power, and why did the civilians say that the emperor was legislator and powerholder, inasmuch as the power of the Roman people, who had been legislators and power-holders, had been

The History of the East Mongols, by Ssanang Ssetsen Chang-saidshi, translated into German by I. J. Schmidt. I owe this interesting passage to my friend, the Rev. Professor J. W. Miles, who directed my attention to the work.

conferred upon them? Because, partly, the first Cæsars, at any rate the very first one, had actually ascended the steps of power with the assistance of some popular element, cheered on somewhat like a diademed tribune; because there was and still is no other real source of power imaginable than the people, whether it consist in positive gift or merely in acquiescence,' and because, as to the historical fact by which power in any given case is acquired, we must never forget that the ethical element and that of intellectual consistency are so inbred in man that, wherever humanity is developed at all, a constant desire is observable to make actions, however immoral or inconsistent, at least theoretically agree with them. No proclamation of war has ever avowed, I believe, that war was simply undertaken, because he who issued the proclamation had the power and meant to use it, fas aut nefas.

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No matter what the violence of facts has been, however rudely the shocks of events have succeeded one another, the first that men do after these events have taken place, is invariably to bring them into some theoretical consistency, and to give some reasonable account of them, at least in appearance. This is the intellectual demand ever active in man. The other equally active one is the ethical

7 As the words stand above, I own they may be variously interpreted; but it would evidently lead me too far, were I to attempt a full statement of the sense in which I take them, which indeed I have done in my Political Ethics.

8 The reader sufficiently acquainted with history will remember that the consul Manlius, when the Galatians, a people in Asia Minor, urged that they had given no offence to the Romans, answered that they were a profligate people deserving punishment, and that some of their ancestors had, centuries before, plundered the temple of Delphi. Justin the historian says, that the Romans assisted the Acarnanians against the Etolians, because the former had joined in the Trojan war a thousand years before. But this principle does not act, even as a caricature, in politics only. What cruelties have not been committed Pro majore Dei gloria!

demand. No man, though he commanded innumerable legions, could stand up before a people, or even a part of them-perhaps not even before himself—and say, "I owe my crown to the murder of my mother, or to the madness of the people, or to slavish officers." To appear merely respectable in an intellectual and ethical point of view, it requires some theoretical decorum. The purer the generally acknowledged code of morality, or the prevailing religion is, or the higher the general mental system which prevails at the time, the more assiduous are also those who lead the public events, to establish, however hypocritically, this apparent agreement between their acts and theory, as well as morals. It is a tribute, though impure, paid to truth and morality.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

IMPERATORIAL SOVEREIGNTY CONTINUED. ITS ORIGIN AND CHARACTER EXAMINED.

IT has been said in the preceding pages, that imperatorial sovereignty must be always the most stringent absolutism, especially when it rests theoretically on the election of the whole, and that the transition from an uninstitutional popular absolutism to the imperatorial sovereignty is easy and natural. In the time of the so-called French republic of 1848, it was a common way of expressing the idea then prevailing to call the people le peuple-roi (the king-people), and an advocate, defending certain persons before the high court of justiciary sitting at Versailles in 1849, for having invaded the chamber of representatives, and consequently having violated the constitution, used this remarkable expression, "the people" (confounding of course a set of people, a gathering of a part of the inhabitants of a single city, with the people) “never violates the constitution."1

Where such ideas prevail, the question is not about a change of ideas, but simply about the lodgement of power. The minds and souls are already thoroughly familiarized with the idea of absolutism, and destitute of the idea of selfgovernment. This is also one of the reasons why there is

1 M. Michel, on the 10th of November. I quote from the French papers, which gave detailed reports. M. Michel, to judge from his own speech, seems to have been the oldest of the defending advocates.

so much similarity between monarchical absolutism, such for instance as we see in Russia, and communism, as it was preached in France; and it explains why absolutism having made rapid strides under the Bourbons before the first revolution, has ended every successive revolution with a still more compressive absolutism and centralism, except indeed the revolution of 1830. This revolution was undertaken to defend parliamentary government, and may be justly called a counter-revolution, on the part of the people, against a revolution attempted and partially carried by the government. It explains farther how Louis. Napoleon after the second of December, and later when he desired to place the crown of uncompromising absolutism on his head, could appeal to the universal suffrage of all France-he that had previously curtailed it, with the assistance of the chamber of representatives. This phenomenon, however, must be explained also by the system of centralism which prevails in France. I shall offer a few remarks on this subject, after having treated of some more details appertaining to the subject immediately in hand.

This idea of the peuple-roi (it would perhaps have been more correct to say peuple-czar) also tends to explain the otherwise inconceivable hatred against the bourgeoisie, by which the French understand the aggregate of those citizens who inhabit towns, and live upon a small amount of property or by traffic. The communists and the French so-called democrats breathed a real hatred against the bourgeoisie; the proclamations, occasionally issued by them, openly avowed it; and the government, when it desired to establish unconditional absolutism in form as well as principle, fanned this hatred. Yet no nation can exist without this essential element of society. In reading the details of French history of the year 1848 and

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