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an's sympathy and coöperation. We want no bas bleus, no female pedants, nor male pedants either, as to that matter; but we do want cultivated, intelligent, women, women who not only love their country, but understand its interests and see its dangers, and can, in their proper sphere, exert a domestic and social influence to elevate society and protect it from the principles and corruption which lead to barbarism. This is no time and no country in which to waste one's life in frivolities or on trifles: Ernst ist das Leben. And seriously should those of either sex whom the world has not yet corrupted, soured, or discouraged, take it, and labor to perform its high and solemn duties.

What we want, what the church wants, what the country wants, is a high-toned Catholic public opinion, independent of the public opinion of the country at large, and in strict accordance with Catholic tradition and Catholic inspirations, so strong, so decided that every Catholic shall feel it, and yield intelligently and lovingly to its sway. It is to you, my dear Catholic young men and Catholic young women, with warm hearts, and cultivated minds, and noble aims, that I appeal to form and sustain such a true Catholic public opinion. You, with the blessing of God and directed by your venerable pastors, can do it. It is already forming, and you can complete it. Every good deed done, every pure thought breathed, every true word spoken, shall quicken some intelligence, touch some heart, inspire some noble soul. Nothing true or good is ever lost, no brilliant example ever shines in vain. It will kindle some fire, illumine some darkness, and gladden some eyes. Be active, be true, be heroic, and you will be successful beyond what you can hope.

CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTIES.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1874.]

WE have recently seen a very striking illustration in the press and in both houses of congress, of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty. The 42d congress, at the close of its last session, passed a salary bill, equalizing the pay of congressmen, and raising their salaries and those of the judges of the supreme court, the president of the United States, the so-called members of the cabinet, and some other officers and employés of the government. The bill was strictly constitutional, and the law was confessedly within the competence of congress, and fixed the salaries not a cent too high. Yet the New York Tribune and other influential journals raised the hue and cry against the law, denounced those members of congress who drew their salary as fixed by law as "salary grabbers," as "thieves," and succeeded in rousing more or less of popular indignation against them. The present congress have judged it necessary to repeal the law in part, and to fix the pay of members as it stood before the 3d of March, 1873, not because they judged the law unconstitutional, unequal, unjust, or unreasonable, but because the people demanded it, or in obedience to what they supposed to be "the will of the people."

For ourselves, we do not think, after congress had abolished the franking privilege, mileage, &c., that the law fixed the pay of a senator or representative any too high; for we think the policy of low salaries for high officers of government from whom the highest order of talent and character is demanded, which our levelling doctrines have hitherto favored, neither wise nor prudent; but this is not the question. The point we raise is that of recognizing the will of the people outside of the constitution as binding on the representative. The only authoritative will of the people under our form of government is that which is embodied in and expressed through the constitution, and it is the only will of the people the representative is bound to obey, or even to consult. To suppose an authoritative will outside of that, or independent of it, is to convert the government from a constitutional government into a government of popular opinion, varying as that most fickle of all things, popular

opinion, varies. It supersedes the constitution, renders it as worthless as so much waste paper, and converts the government into the worst possible form of democracy; and democracy was held in horror by the fathers of the republic.

Then, if the free, unbiassed popular opinion were a firm and solid support for government, everybody knows that what passes for popular opinion is not the opinion even of the people, nine-tenths of whom are incapable of forming an opinion for themselves, but the opinion of the journals, demagogues, and unscrupulous politicians. The process of manufacturing public opinion is very simple, and well understood, and no sensible man has the least respect for it. It is purely an artificial thing, made to order. Two or three men are sufficient to manufacture it for an entire state. An able editor denounces a policy as unpopular, and with a little effort he succeeds in making it so, and woe to the man that dares to resist it. Get up a cry against a man that he is unpopular, and henceforth, though the first man in the nation for intelligence, capacity, honesty, wisdom, and probity, he is politically null. The politicians drop him as unavailable, that is, as a man they cannot use. Just so of a policy. Let the journals decry it, the small politicians denounce it, for they have nothing to gain by it, and the people are said to have decided against it, and foolishly imagine that they have really done so, although the mass of them have really no opinion, one way or the other, on the subject. Knowing how public or popular opinion is formed, we confess we have no respect for it. We do not suppose that one man in a hundred, capable of forming an intelligent opinion on the subject, honestly believes the law of the 42d congress raised salaries above a fair and reasonable compensation; but some unscrupulous politicians or journalists thought that they saw in opposition to it an element of popularity, a chance to make some personal or party capital, and forthwith set themselves at work to manufacture public opinion against it, and frighten the present congress into its partial repeal.

This recognition of an authoritative will of the people outside of that expressed in the constitution, which has no official organ for its expression, and which the government in its several departments, legislative, judicial, and executive or administrative, is not legally bound to consult and obey, so constantly and strenuously insisted on by an irre

sponsible press, which compels the government in all its branches by the very law of its existence to inquire what is or will be popular, not what is true, wise, or just, is one of our greatest dangers, and if not soon abandoned, will inevitably involve our moral, political, and social ruin. We are neither monarchists nor aristocrats, and we hold that the people, under God, are politically sovereign. Even kings and nobles hold their power from God through the people, and are responsible to them for its exercise. But the sovereign people are the organic people, not the people as an unorganized mass of individuals. It is, as St. Augustine somewhere says, "the people as the republic, organized for the common good." No form of human government but has its imperfections; none can secure the community against every evil, or procure it every good. Some forms are better, and some worse for some countries; but we have always believed the republican form is the best, as it is the only legitimate form, for us. As a Catholic we are opposed to all absolute governments, whether monarchical or democratic; as an American, we defend with all our powers, the constitutional republic, such as our fathers sought to establish, and fondly believed they had established. We regard as unAmerican and in effect treasonable, every doctrine, measure, or tendency, that threatens the constitution, or that departs from it, whether in the direction of monarchy or in the direction of a pure democracy, which asserts the sovereignty of the people as an inorganic mass or mere population.

We have no sympathy with the republicans anywhere in Europe, because they are, without exception, what we call absolutists, and hold the people are absolutely sovereign, with no authority above them, and absolutely free to do whatever they please. They hold that the people are not simply sovereign in the political order, under God, but are in the place of God, and not subject to his law, or bound to ascertain and govern in accordance with his will. The people, on their theory, are sovereign, as the Democratic Review maintained some years since, "in their own underived right and might, inside or outside of constitutions," and consequently they deny the sovereignty of God, and make the people God, which, we need not say, they are not, and cannot be. European republicans, Garibaldi and Gambetta, like European cæsarists, Kaiser Wilhelm and his chancellor, Bismarck, like the Russian czar and his ministers, are political atheists. They deny God in the political order, and reject all divine

authority in temporal affairs. They subject the church to the state, the spiritual to the temporal. Their political system is founded on a falsehood-is a lie, and can be held by no man who holds the divine sovereignty, and with St. Paul, that, non est potestas nisi a Deo. We neither sympathize with them, nor wish them success, for they are at war with the divine order, and seek to reverse the immutable law of the universe. We see only danger to our own republic in the sympathy of our government and people with them.

We do not oppose European republicans or democrats in the interests of the old European monarchies, but in the interests of religion and civilization, order and liberty. The present anarchical state of Europe is due to the emancipation of the governments from the law of God, or the traditional jus gentium, and this emancipation is due to the governments, not to the people or the republicans, who only follow the example set them by monarchists. The protest against the divine sovereignty began with kings and their ministers, not with the people, and has descended from them to the people. The people of France, in the height of their republican madness, or in their worst revolutionary paroxysms, if more violent in their acts, never, in principle, went further against the sovereignty of God than did Peter the Great and Catherine II. of Russia, Joseph II. and Prince Kaunitz of Austria, and Frederic the Great of Prussia, or than does imperial Germany or royal Italy now. The sovereigns, who made or fostered the so-called reformation, and the Bourbons, who set up or formulated the Gallican dualism, were the founders of the present atheistical democracy of Europe, and are to be held chiefly responsible for the existing anarchy. We cannot, with history before us, exonerate European monarchy any more than European democracy. Hence we do not believe that the restoration of monarchy will prove an effectual remedy either in France or Spain, where it has been overthrown. We have as little confidence in kings as in peoples.

But to return to our subject. We recognize the sovereignty, under God, of the organic American people, and admit their will must govern, has the right to govern, for there is no political power above them. But we hold that it is their will expressed in and through the constitution. Their will expressed outside of the constitution, and collected from journals, the resolutions of caucuses, or even the state legislatures, has no legal force, and no authority to control the

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