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 http://www.archive.org/details/centennialofrevoOOhurdrich 
 
THE CENTENNIAL 
 
 OF A 
 
 REVOLUTION: 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 A REVOLUTIONIST 
 
 n 
 
 NEW YORK & LONDON 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 Cfce 3&m'cfcevbocfccr %&zss 
 
 iSSS 
 
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 3 
 
 COPYRIGHT BV 
 
 WM. H. FARRINGTON 
 
 &/*/? 
 
 Press of 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York 
 
THE CENTENNIAL 
 
 or a 
 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 AN ADDRESS BY A REVOLUTIONIST. 
 
 Fellow Subjects:— 
 
 We celebrated the 17th of Sep- 
 tember, 1887, as the centennial anniversary of 
 an event which we chose to call the Adoption 
 of the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 The annual return, in the calendar of months, 
 of a day remarked only as coincident with the 
 date of a past event, however great its impor- 
 tance, should not be enough to give it the ob- 
 servance of an anniversary. All true anniver- 
 saries look backward upon something which, 
 having once been, has ever since continued to 
 be : not on anything which once was, but is 
 now no longer. For the record of deeds done 
 and things which have been, the inscription of 
 their days and years in the stony mausoleums 
 of history is sufficient. The anniversary, to be 
 one — to be a "return of the day" — should mark 
 another year of duration. The 22d of Febru- 
 I 
 
1 The Centennial 
 
 ary, recurring, may mark for us another year 
 of continuation for that political achievement 
 for which Washington stands as representative 
 of his generation's claim on memory. If that 
 achievement has become a dead thing, the rec- 
 ollection of his birthday is only a ghost haunt- 
 ing a sepulchre, and we must choose the natal 
 day of some hero of our more modern history 
 for stimulating the patriotic instincts. Anni- 
 versary — annual, or centennial — asserts contin- 
 uance. No index by the finger of time which 
 reminds of what only was and has ceased to be 
 deserves the name. The Christian era and the 
 days commemorated year after year in its rites 
 and churches are what they are only as the life 
 of the Founder and the passages of His earthly 
 existence, are reflected in the lives and disci- 
 pline of a continuing body of believers. 
 
 Had we thought to observe the year 1887 as 
 the centenary of a continuing existence — a con- 
 tinuing event, a continuing action, a continuing 
 something? What and where then is that 
 which as the thing or action, called the Adop- 
 tion of the Constitution, was once and has 
 since continued to be ? Is it the adoption it- 
 self? Is that the continuing event? Or was 
 
of a Revolution. 3 
 
 that one of those deeds which, when done, are 
 done once, have their effect and cease being 
 done ; having no years of duration to be num- 
 bered ? You may say — Well, what if that 
 adoption was the bare deed of a day, a month, 
 or a year, which being once done had no con- 
 tinuance, was not the result the real event in 
 the adoption, and was not this result an exist- 
 ence which then began and which could con- 
 tinue — the continuing Government of the 
 United States, then ordained and established 
 by the constitution then adopted ; a govern- 
 ment framed according to that adoption ? Do 
 we not see it to-day, with our eyes, as our 
 grandfathers and great-grandfathers saw it 
 then ? What better continuing thing can 
 there be : adoption or no adoption ? 
 
 So then, we see now, do we, what our pre- 
 decessors saw beginning one hundred years 
 ago, when the constitution was adopted in a 
 convention at Philadelphia? Very well. Sup- 
 pose we should talk together a little, more or 
 less, about this hundred-year-old existence. 
 
 By celebrating anniversaries, each successive 
 generation thinks to identify itself with those 
 \vho in other days and as its predecessors, 
 
4 The Centennial 
 
 established the actual conditions of its own 
 physical, social, and political existence. Yet 
 to each mature individual of the human race 
 his conception of a century of years brings 
 with it the consciousness of the limited span 
 of his own share in that existence. A genera- 
 tion's continuance is brief under the guaging 
 of a century. We accept it as inevitable that 
 none who to-day act and think in the con- 
 sciousness of social relations will be so acting 
 and thinking at the close of the century lying 
 before us. Four generations may be computed 
 to have shared the duration of the century just 
 passed, and we recognize that none of us who 
 have trod the stage of life among the last, could 
 also have participated in the activity of the 
 first of these generations. And yet you of 
 this generation, celebrating this centennial year, 
 believe that you see the same Government of 
 the United States which the third, the second, 
 and the first of those preceding generations 
 saw. 
 
 We assume that we are living in the one 
 hundredth year since a government for a coun- 
 try called " The United States " came into 
 existence ; a government acting by executing, 
 
of a Revolution. 5 
 
 by legislating, by judging, by president, by 
 congress, by judiciary. But what has been 
 or whatever could be this government, that 
 our fathers in their generations or we in ours 
 should cherish its anniversaries ? What is any 
 government ? Not what is government in 
 general, or governing in the abstract, as a 
 variety of human action ; but what is a govern- 
 ment, that it can be said to have begun, to con- 
 tinue, to exist ; to be called the, or this or that 
 government; your, our, anybody's govern- 
 ment ; to be seen or felt, talk and be talked 
 to, as being here or there, in this or any other 
 part of the earth? Is a government, to your 
 minds, some group of individuals, titled and 
 salaried, as executive, legislative, judicial func- 
 tionaries, fulfilling, officially, duties prescribed, 
 while using powers delegated to them as agents, 
 under some law resting on the continuing ex- 
 istence, power and will of some one else, some 
 person or persons to whom such officials are 
 individually and collectively subordinate, or as 
 an administration ; while these other person or 
 persons hold all powers of political jurisdiction 
 in absolute independence or sovereignty, with 
 capacity to give or withhold, delegate or recall 
 
6 The Centennial 
 
 all or any such powers by their free command, 
 written or unwritten ? 
 
 If the Government of the United States has, 
 all along, been such a government only — an 
 administration to whom the written constitu- 
 tion has been an authorizing act or power of 
 attorney, or a statutory enactment resting on 
 some continuing possession of sovereignty — 
 then the adoption of that constitution should 
 have been a continuing act of will on the part 
 of the possessor of that sovereignty ; an act 
 which, as adoption, could continue, and which, 
 by enduring all these one hundred years has 
 continuously sustained that government since 
 the day it was first instituted and ordained. 
 
 If, on the other hand, this government by 
 successive presidents, congresses and judiciaries 
 did one hundred years ago, through the adop- 
 tion of the constitution, acquire any power or 
 powers, as power abdicated by some then exist- 
 ing possessor, or as surrendered by such, or as 
 transferred once for all, so far as such possessor 
 was concerned, and passed over, so far as sover- 
 eign power can pass by any act of its possessors, 
 to some other person — then, the adoption is a 
 dead past event, and the continuing thing for 
 
of a Revolution. 7 
 
 our centennial anniversary is our Government, 
 found in the persons of our President, our Con- 
 gress, our Judiciary of the United States ; the 
 only thing or personality that can have con- 
 tinued, so far as anything resulting from such 
 adoption of the constitution has continued at 
 all. 
 
 If we, in our generation, are agreed as to 
 which of these two views of the action called 
 " the adoption of the Constitution of the 
 United States" is the true one, -we shall show 
 ourselves either better or worse historical critics 
 than our fathers in the generations which have 
 preceded us in the century now ending. From 
 the first hour of that so-called " adoption " the 
 dispute has waged, mild or bitter, with words 
 or with swords — whether it was legislative 
 action or political transfer ; power of attorney 
 or abdication. But settled or unsettled, we 
 might have our anniversaries as well as our 
 ancestors : celebrate the centennial in spite of 
 that controversy, as we individually should like 
 it best, either as antiquarians- or as politicians. 
 We are all agreed that a hundred years are 
 a century, that it is now a hundred years since 
 1787, and so have our processions, jollifications, 
 
8 The Centennial 
 
 and speechifications, with as much or as little 
 harmony as our predecessors. 
 
 But whatever it may have been that began 
 by that adoption in 1787, have we any assur- 
 ance that it has continued to the present day : 
 any assurance that the government of the 
 United States, then first seen, has continued, 
 either as government under law, resting on con- 
 tinuing adoption, or as government holding 
 enumerated powers through grant, cession or 
 abdication by an earlier possessor of those 
 powers? Does the continued succession of pres- 
 idents, senators, congressmen, justices ; elected, 
 titled, salaried, like their earliest predecessors, 
 show, for certain, an identity and continuity of 
 that government which began in 1787-9? May 
 there not have been a conquest? The con- 
 queror allowing all forms of administration, 
 according to the written constitution and local 
 laws, to remain though deriving, thereafter, 
 their force from that conqueror, the adminis- 
 trative officials being sworn to obey the terms 
 of the written constitution as being the order 
 of the conqueror. Such changes have often 
 occurred in other countries. 
 
 A conquest by a foreign power should, you 
 
of a Revolution. g 
 
 would say, have a record in the international 
 transactions of the time. But then, in the 
 reciprocal action of the governing and the 
 governed, some revolutions are like conquests. 
 Our revolution of 1776 was much like a con- 
 quest. Quite so, so far as the British empire 
 was concerned. Somebody, or somebodies, 
 assumed the national right to carry on war 
 against the King and parliament of England, 
 as a foreign power ; and the issue of force made 
 that somebody or those somebodies what they 
 had undertaken to be by their Declaration of 
 Independencec But there was very little 
 change in form of local government. Colonial 
 laws and administrations kept their course 
 with little or no change, so far as the lives of 
 private citizens were concerned. 
 
 But if there has been no conquest, can you 
 be certain that there has been no revolution 
 since the adoption of the constitution ? In 
 any country, if we want to know where the 
 government, in the highest sense, is to be 
 found — that is, upon whose will the laws and 
 administration depend for existence — we must 
 go back to the last conquest or to the last 
 revolution, if there is no conqueror to be reck- 
 
io The Centennial 
 
 oned with. So, in England, the writers on 
 history and public law have referred their gov- 
 ernment to the Revolution of 1688, and, 
 before that, to the Norman Conquest. In 
 France, the government from time to time for 
 the last century has been known by the latest 
 of the successive revolutions. The present 
 Empire of Germany, wherever the supreme 
 power may be, dates from the last mixture of 
 conquest and revolution. 
 
 Revolution, however, is not legislative 
 change nor any alteration, for better or worse, 
 in the administration of justice between man 
 and man, nor any change of social relations. 
 The century now past has witnessed a vast 
 multitude of changes. Changes in extent of 
 knowledge of nature's conditions, moral as 
 well as physical. Laws have changed, affect- 
 ing men in many material and moral relations. 
 
 "The old order changeth, giving place to the new." 
 
 But such change is not revolution. It is 
 distinct from it, even when accompanied by it. 
 Change, to be revolution, must be change 
 above law ; in that, having a resemblance to a 
 conquest. Change by force in the possession 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 
 
 of that power, whatever you may call it, which 
 is visibly exercised in every rule submitted to 
 as law ; power, the visible holding of which 
 by some particular person or persons in a state 
 or nation can be recognized abroad, as well as 
 at home, and which is called, for convenience, 
 sovereign, whether the holders be one, or a 
 few, or many, and which is equally absolute 
 power, whether the possession be called 
 democratic or monarchic. Revolutions of this 
 sort are interruptions of something which, 
 until then, had continued from some earlier 
 period. If there has been a revolution of this 
 sort here since 1787, there is no century of 
 continuance either for the adoption of the con- 
 stitution or for the government then brought 
 into being, whatever it was. Our centennial 
 recalls only a deed, and the memory of the 
 dead. 
 
 You may well say — How is anybody to 
 know that there has been a revolution ? Or, 
 which is nearly the same thing, you may ask — 
 What is the nature of the change, if there has 
 been any ? A revolution, to be one, should 
 have produced a different investiture of the 
 ultimate political jurisdiction from that which 
 
12 The Centennial 
 
 was recognized in recognizing the adoption it- 
 self. Perhaps, in order to explain this to a 
 stranger, it would be necessary that he should 
 first be shown what the investiture had been 
 before 1787, and why it was that George 
 Washington, and other persons whom we used 
 to think respectable, soon afterwards took the 
 responsibility of regarding that constitution as 
 law, and of acting as a government according 
 to its provisions. But, as we all proposed to 
 celebrate the very thing, we must be supposed 
 to have known all about this ; and those who 
 tell you of a revolution, since that adoption, if 
 you hear of any, need only show you how 
 things now are and you will yourselves judge 
 of the difference. 
 
 Well, as to any revolution during the past 
 century, perhaps you may think that the first 
 to know of such revolution would be those 
 who had taken a solemn oath to sustain the 
 constitution of the country. Sure enough, if 
 by the term, the constitution of the country, 
 we understand the possession of supreme 
 political power above law — the political fact 
 upon which all laws, including the written con- 
 stitution for general government, depend ; and 
 
of a Revolution. 1 3 
 
 also, if any can be found who have taken an 
 oath to support that political fact. But who 
 has ever taken such an oath? A few natural- 
 ized foreigners, and by implication only, when 
 renouncing allegiance to a former sovereign ; 
 or perhaps, by a similar implication only, 
 some voters under military supervision in 
 "border" States or in " reconstructed " States, 
 about twenty-five years ago. Do you think 
 of officers of the government ? No president, 
 senator, congressman, judge of the supreme 
 court, no national or state official ever took 
 such an oath before 1862. An implication of 
 some sort of allegiance may be discerned in 
 the act of Congress of July 2, 1862, requir- 
 ing an oath framed to exclude from official 
 position all who had been in the Confederate 
 service. But this oath, so far as it goes beyond 
 the older form, was rejected as unconstitu- 
 tional by the Supreme Court in Garland's case. 
 An oath of allegiance, as known in other 
 countries, is here unknown. Some say there 
 cannot be such, her.e : that there is no sover- 
 eign here and no allegiance, no oath of allegi- 
 ance possible. Had there been such in 1787, 
 the civil war, such as it was, in 1 861-5, would 
 
14 The Centennial 
 
 have been an impossibility. The oath to sup- 
 port the Constitution — the written " adopted " 
 Constitution as law — as long as it is law — the 
 only oath required by the Constitution itself, 
 or which has, thus far, the sanction of the 
 Supreme Court, is a totally different thing. 
 Neither revolution nor conquest, necessarily 
 interferes with such an oath. Would you ex- 
 pect the Justices of the Supreme Court now 
 on the bench to say outright, if it were the 
 fact, — The constitution we administer as law- 
 to-day derives its authority now from a politi- 
 cal personality distinct and different from that 
 which " adopted " it in 1787, whatever that 
 may have been ? Why should they trouble 
 themselves to think about it more, or even as 
 much, as Jay and his associates at the first 
 start? Those Justices did think, more or less, 
 and wrangle too, more or less, as we can see in 
 the reports, about the political question. But 
 this question — whether this government rested 
 on an adequate political authority — was one 
 that each Justice had to decide > for his own 
 satisfaction, before he undertook the office at 
 all. He was like everybody else, as to that ; 
 and, on that question, his opinion was of no 
 
of a Revolution. 1 5 
 
 more authority after he had taken his seat on 
 the bench than before. But, somehow, they 
 got along together well enough in applying 
 the instrument as law. The present Justices 
 will tell us that they can go on settling dis- 
 putes, according to the Constitution as taw, 
 just as well as their predecessors. They don't, 
 as yet, bother with the question of a revolution 
 since the " adoption." Practically, they may 
 say, as their predecessors since 1787 had said : 
 Where's the use ? Somebody adopts the con- 
 stitution as taw to-day ; and that's enough for 
 any one who, in accepting the office of apply- 
 ing a law, assumes that it is derived from some 
 existing political authority. We shall prob- 
 ably not hear of any revolution from any man 
 speaking as judge of any court, high or low ; 
 even if, as private citizen, he had heard talk of 
 such. If judges are necessarily statesmen as 
 well as office-holders, they might be expected 
 to have some perception of the question ; but 
 their opinions about the matter, as matter of 
 fact and not of law, are only testimony, and, 
 as such, important according to the extent of 
 perceptive faculty and honesty, but 110 pfiore. 
 
1 6 The Centennial 
 
 evidence than the opinions of others who are 
 not officials. 
 
 Well then, as to ordinary testimony as to 
 the occurrence of events like revolutions : let 
 us first look over that part of the century 
 which many of us, not very old, may call our 
 own times — the quarter century just ended. 
 May not anybody who could have seen a revo- 
 lution in that time be asked to testify? Some- 
 times those who stand further off can see a 
 big thing better than any who have been sit- 
 ting under its shadow. What if we should 
 inquire of strangers, of foreign publicists, men 
 whose occupation is to study and record the 
 changes of states and empires? Now we 
 know how the English — 
 
 " Ho, ho," I think I hear you say, " hold on 
 now; we want none of that there." Natu- 
 rally enough, you will recall the attitude taken 
 by their public men in 1861 and say that the 
 governing classes desired the success of the 
 secessionists, from interested motives, and 
 that their organs of public opinion professed 
 to regard each State at liberty, for reasons 
 judged fit by itself, to withdraw from a union 
 which, in view of public law, was only an in- 
 
of a Revolution. i 7 
 
 ternational alliance. So, if anyone were to 
 cite opinions of English writers, of whatever 
 reputation, of that time or later, holding that 
 the repression of the Southern Confederacy by 
 the then administrative government and its 
 political action, afterwards, in reconstruction, 
 was revolutionary as regarded the preexisting 
 political constitution of the whole country, — 
 we ought to reject such testimony with con- 
 tempt. 
 
 You would say — one might as well ask the 
 opinion of Jeff Davis and the rest of the Seces- 
 sionists, and of those at the North who were 
 opposed to fighting the confederacy — those 
 we used to call copperheads. 
 
 Just so. We may reasonably pretend to 
 know better than foreigners, what our union 
 and constitution had been ; and you may say 
 — Why should not the action of millions of 
 compatriots who gave their means, and of 
 thousands who gave their lives to the suppres- 
 sion of what they called " the rebellion " be 
 evidence that they proposed to sustain Union 
 and Constitution as they had before existed? 
 Yet it would perhaps be rash to rely on this 
 class of witnesses for a full concurrence of 
 2 
 
1 8 The Centennial 
 
 opinion on this point : or, to inquire very 
 closely what the object and political expecta- 
 tion was, in the minds of the majority, which 
 can be stated as corresponding with their own 
 views of the preexisting location of political 
 power. It might be awkward, in celebrating 
 the adoption of a century-old constitution as 
 if it, or its resulting government, had con- 
 tinued, to take a census of opinion as to the 
 object of the war on the part of the North ; 
 even among others of our people who, to all 
 appearance, were distinguishable from either 
 class of "our misguided fellow citizens," — the 
 rebels or their sympathizers. Would it be 
 advisable to take an estimate of those who, 
 agreeing or disagreeing with the Southern 
 people in their views of the political constitu- 
 tion, upheld the government in the war solely 
 on account of the anti-slavery feeling ; of those 
 who, not caring a red cent for your "adopted" 
 constitution, which for years they had called 
 " a covenant with hell," had themselves urged 
 separation on the part of the North ; who, on 
 the same principle, were in favor of letting the 
 " wayward sisters go in peace ; " of those who 
 recognized a right of State secession for any 
 
of a Revolution. 1 9 
 
 motive not as immoral as that of sustaining 
 negro-slavery, and those who, as the war was 
 protracted, made emancipation and the abro- 
 gation of all laws founded on a distinction of 
 color the condition of their further supporting 
 the government? 
 
 How many were there, besides, who, caring 
 nothing for the negro question, regarded the 
 Confederacy as having become foreign, by 
 their States' capacity to break from the obliga- 
 tion of a federal compact, and who urged the 
 war by the Northern States, as an interna- 
 tional war to compel involuntary reunion, for 
 the sake of their own political and material 
 interest, regardless of any right founded on 
 the adopted constitution ? How many were 
 there then who said, as thousands would say 
 to-day — I may be inconsistent in supporting 
 the government in this particular case, but, 
 right or wrong, I would go with my own 
 State ? 
 
 If such a census of individual opinions could 
 be taken, we might infer that, whatever " the 
 war for the union " may have been in its re- 
 sult, it could not have been on^ in which a 
 
26 The Centennial 
 
 majority of the people of the whole country 
 proposed to sustain our constitution of 1787. 
 
 But, leaving all such defenders of " the union 
 as it was, and the constitution as it is " to 
 reconcile themselves to themselves, when they 
 join in our centennial, how many are there to- 
 day at the end of the quarter century, promi- 
 nent persons, who have claimed — as the result 
 of the war — not the sustentation ol that adop- 
 tion but its destruction ; who tell us plainly 
 that a change has taken place ; a political 
 change ; more than one of laws and statutes, 
 of measures and of men, being a shifting in 
 the possession of supreme unitary power : not 
 merely a modified distribution of power, agreed 
 upon between a " North " and a " South " to 
 enlarge the powers of a general government, 
 nor yet by a voluntary surrender of specific 
 powers by the requisite number of States, in 
 the way of Constitutional Amendment, but a 
 change which was compulsory as to all the 
 States, Northern or Southern, " loyal" or " dis- 
 loyal"; placing all independent political power 
 in one central hand ; to be found somewhere, 
 where it was not before ; a hand, now, not 
 under but above the written constitution ; 
 
of a Revolution. 2 1 
 
 because now above the consent of any or all 
 the States. 
 
 There are thousands, tens of thousands 
 among us who are industriously nursing this 
 notion, more or less distinctly ; who rejoice 
 and glorify themselves as good patriots, and 
 that in all sincerity, in trying to believe that 
 this change was effected by force. So that, as 
 to the question whether the constitution framed 
 in 1787 has been superseded during the last 
 quarter of a century by a revolution, — there is 
 a pretty loud showing of most sweet voices, 
 discordant enough except as to the fact that 
 there was a revolution about twenty-five years 
 ago, some recognizing it with scorn and hate, 
 while still cherishing the memory of a lost 
 cause ; some exalting it as a measure of govern- 
 ment, extraordinary indeed, but justified simply 
 as vindicating their own private theories of 
 public morality ; and others, thoroughly and 
 with full consideration, accepting it as a change 
 bringing grander hopes to themselves, to their 
 children and to their countrymen. Pleased or 
 displeased, they, or you perhaps, or a majority 
 of us, are a multitude of witnesses agreed as 
 
22 The Centennial 
 
 to the fact ; ourselves corroborating the ver- 
 dict of English observers, whose record of their 
 times, whether we may like it or not, will be 
 noticed in making up the world-history. 
 
 Do you suppose that only the unreflecting 
 vulgar, dazzled by the military display of civil 
 war, and crying ha, ha ! like Job's horse, amid 
 the thunders of the captains and the shoutings, 
 are the ones to talk about a revolution since 
 1861 ? 
 
 Well, then, you may call it what you please ; 
 but, if the constitution adopted a century ago, 
 or the form of government then first organized, 
 has, by any means whatever, been essentially 
 changed, either for good or for evil, your anni- 
 versaries of adoption came to an end some time 
 before September 17, 1887. It was a very ap- 
 posite comment, just after that date, of a very 
 influential critical authority, with regard to 
 this same question of the existence of a cen- 
 tennial of continuance: 
 
 " It is rather curious that amid the numerous 
 comments which the celebration of the Consti- 
 tution has called forth, so little mention has 
 been made of the failure of the instrument to 
 
of a Revolution. 23 
 
 overcome the main difficulties in the way of 
 its original framers."* 
 
 After a summary statement of the discor- 
 dant influences in different sections, arising 
 mainly from different views of negro slavery, 
 the writer remarks : — 
 
 " When these things are taken into account 
 we think it will be generally admitted that the 
 Constitution may fairly be considered as hav- 
 ing existed in what may be called a provisional 
 or experimental stage down to 1861, and that 
 a very large share of whatever glory is due to 
 its frame rs belongs of right to the men of the 
 generation now passing away. They, twenty- 
 five years ago, resolved that they would cure 
 its defects at whatever cost, and put it into an 
 undeniably permanent shape, and did so amid 
 difficulties compared to which those of the 
 convention of 1787 were a mere trifle." 
 
 And, farther on: — 
 
 " Consider again the condition of doubt in 
 which the old Constitution left a large part of 
 the population as to the real seat of sovereignty 
 in the United States It fell to the lot 
 
 *The Nation: Sep. 22, 18S7. Editorial "Some Things 
 Overlooked at the Centennial." 
 
24 The Centennial 
 
 of the men of 1861 to settle once for all 
 whether the Federal Government was a na- 
 tional government or not, and they settled it 
 at a cost from which the men of 1787 would 
 undoubtedly have shrunk in dismay. They 
 gave the Constitution that final sanction with- 
 out which no government is ever strong or 
 ever can command general obedience — the 
 sanction, namely, which comes from the-knowl- 
 edge that it has irresistible physical force at 
 its back." 
 
 And, farther on : — 
 
 " The men who revised the Constitution in 
 1863-5 and who have given it to us in a shape 
 which will probably undergo no great change 
 as long as the social organization continues 
 what it is at present, did not hesitate to ask the 
 people to say whether the Federal Govern- 
 ment had that final sanction without which no 
 government, however deftly framed on paper, 
 can properly be considered a government at 
 all. They got the answer they expected and 
 desired, but it required enormous wisdom and 
 courage to ask the question boldly, and to 
 turn the answer to its proper account." 
 
 And in conclusion, a very logical conclusion 
 
oj a Revolution. 25 
 
 from the historical statement thus given, is the 
 writer's remark — far more to the point than 
 all the splurge at Philadelphia, last September. 
 
 " In view of all this, it seems to us as if a 
 very large part of whatever fame the construc- 
 tion of the Federal Government reflects on the 
 American people, is due to those who gave the 
 organic law its final revision ; and we think it 
 by no means unlikely that those who celebrate 
 the next centennial of the Constitution will be 
 disposed to put the date in 1865 rather than 
 in 1787, or will, at all events, hesitate between 
 the two years." 
 
 All this is well enough, as to the point of a 
 continuing centenary. But it is not so strong 
 in describing the event as a " revision," " final " 
 or otherwise of the "organic law"; if by 
 "law" here we are to understand what we all 
 understand as law. It is a paltering statement 
 to say that somebody, designated as " the men 
 of 1861," or "the men of the generation now 
 passing away," " revised " — fortunately for 
 them, it appears, with the approval of the 
 critic — the written constitution of 1787, by 
 getting some new provisions engrossed in it, 
 to increase the authority of " the former (?) 
 
26 The Centennial 
 
 Federal Government." For it is not so much 
 that a written constitution has been revised or 
 changed or destroyed, by written Amend- 
 ments, as that the adoption of any constitution 
 has changed. Our constitution, as law, sur- 
 vives or revives by resting on a new 
 authority, as it might in the case of a con- 
 quest. It is now for us to hold that, while 
 good enough for the present at least, as a 
 law, the authority to which it had been re- 
 ferred, before 1861 — whatever that may have 
 been — had proved inadequate to the general 
 purpose of the good of the whole cotintry or the 
 Union, taken in that sense. It is to be held, 
 that with that basis for the written constitu- 
 tion which as " adoption " — whatever that may 
 have been — we proposed to celebrate, last Sep- 
 tember, the maintenance of the Union in that 
 sense, was impossible, and that as this Union, 
 in that sense, has actually been sustained in 
 1 86 [-5, some other authority for that consti- 
 tution — some authority not known in the 
 adoption of 1787 — was to be found, or, rather, 
 has been found in the fact — the political fact 
 above law — that the persons who from 1861 to 
 JS65 formed the administrative government 
 
of a Revolution. 2 7 
 
 established under the adopted constitution of 
 1787, with their partisans, had — as " the men 
 of 1863-5," if you like — exercised and held, 
 independently of such constitution, all powers 
 necessary to the continued existence, in their 
 successors, of a government absolute, or with- 
 out living superiors ; becoming a government 
 as political fact above law ; the constitution, 
 thereafter being theirs, or resting on their will 
 — on their adoption. 
 
 As a consequence, the powers held by the 
 Government being held as of sovereign right, 
 are no longer " granted " and the powers held 
 by the States, severally, are no longer " re- 
 served " as of their sovereign will, but have 
 become allowed, permitted, or as if granted to 
 them, yet not absolutely ; but subject to recall 
 at the will of a new possessor of absolute, en- 
 tire sovereignty, whose only representative, so 
 far as it can itself be less than sovereign, is a 
 Central Government, which has replaced the 
 former Federal Government under the written 
 constitution. 
 
 We may gather utterance of such opinions 
 in abundance out of the speeches of leading 
 public men, especially of such as were promi- 
 
28 The Centennial 
 
 nent in defending the measures of the Govern- 
 ment during the Reconstruction years; and in 
 scattered publications of various sorts, such as 
 reviews and magazine articles, political trea- 
 tises or fragmentary essays, shortly after that 
 time. But you can hardly take up any news- 
 paper supporting one of the two greater po- 
 litical parties — naturally enough that party, 
 which for good or for evil, held the ostensible 
 power of the Federal Government during the 
 period when it must have taken place — without 
 finding the assumption of such a revolution. 
 If you do not find it also recognized by the 
 organs of the opposite party, it is because, 
 though its adherents at the North supported 
 the cause of the Union, as understood by 
 themselves, they never felt themselves com- 
 mitted to approval of results which were due 
 mainly to views of the nature of government 
 in general and political expediency held by 
 the party then in power, rather than to any 
 construction of the written constitutional law. 
 Yet if any fundamental change has been ac- 
 complished, it will remain independently of 
 pnrties or of anybody's recognition. You 
 : i ;y individually be of either party or of no 
 
of a Revolution. 29 
 
 party, but, if such revolution was the fact — 
 what centennial was there to celebrate in 
 1887? Where was the continuing event that 
 should still be on hand after one hundred 
 years ? 
 
 Well, this has been a century for revolu- 
 tions. Even if this was a smashing of the 
 political constitution, that has taken place be- 
 fore the eyes of the present generation, why 
 complain as if something beyond the common 
 lot had befallen us? If it is the fact, why 
 hesitate to say so ? 
 
 But we have wandered a little from the 
 main inquiry which we proposed, and which is 
 not settled by our rejection of a revolution in 
 1861-5. For that inquiry related to a period 
 of time of which the last twenty-five years is 
 only a quarter part. It was whether at any 
 time since 1787 revolution had interrupted the 
 continuance of that political action whose cent- 
 ury of existence we would have celebrated 
 last September. To prove a revolution since 
 1861 would be an answer to the point. But 
 there were three-quarters of a century before 
 that date, counting" from 1787. How would it 
 apply to our inquiry if, some time in the course 
 
30 The Centennial 
 
 of those seventy-five years, a revolution had 
 taken place which had already produced that 
 very political status, that identical location of 
 supreme power, which these various witnesses 
 in our own generation think they saw taking 
 place only since the beginning of the civil 
 war? Convenient, it might be thought, for 
 those at the North who would shun the ap- 
 parent inconsistency involved in the accept- 
 ance of a revolution, through their share in 
 that war by which they claimed to have sus- 
 tained the then existing constitution. The 
 discovery of such a revolution at some date 
 earlier than 1861 would stop the mouths of 
 captious English and French who call the 
 Northerners self-stultified in talking of a 
 Southern " rebellion." Convenient, perhaps, 
 for that particular purpose ; but can it be so 
 for us who proposed to glorify the centennial 
 of an existence since 1787? Now, let us see! 
 Supposing that such a revolution had at 
 some moment in those seventy-five years be- 
 fore 1 86 1 already taken place. Well, if that 
 moment was not far, not so very far from the 
 date of what we had called the "adoption " of 
 the constitution, we might have a centennial 
 
of a Revolution. 3 1 
 
 celebration for that revolution which would so 
 nearly coincide with the centennial of the 
 adoption, supposing there was such a thing, 
 that one could hardly distinguish them apart, 
 at this distance of time. Now, if this revolu- 
 tion might have occurred at any time after the 
 century began, why not just a year or so af- 
 ter? why not a few months, a few weeks or 
 days? why not the same day — one in the 
 morning and the other in the afternoon? 
 Why ! they might have been so close in point 
 of time as to have become so mixed up in the 
 historical record that this important revolution 
 was hardly, if at all, noticed at the moment, 
 in consequence of the fuss that was made 
 about the more visible ceremonial of what our 
 fathers called " adoption," whatever that was, 
 that had for seventy-five years before 1861 
 appeared as the thing done and the thing con- 
 tinuing ! But now, you see, if we can get the 
 date of the last revolution fixed for us by this 
 computation, it saves our century of continu- 
 ance of the adoption, to celebrate in the year 
 1887, assuming now that you are not going to 
 believe that there has been a revolution since 
 
32 The CentennLil 
 
 1861 to interrupt the continuance of that we 
 called the adoption of 1787. 
 
 Will you call this " trifling with the sub- 
 ject?" Well; we, who trifle thus, trifle in 
 good company. Do not condemn us, for sav- 
 ing your anniversaries in this way, without 
 looking at our respectability — ours, who tell 
 you of the revolution of 1787. There -are 
 more, perhaps, among us than you may think 
 of the literary or college fellows, as you may 
 sarcastically call them, who can do this sort of 
 thing and put it in print. 
 
 You think yourselves familiar with history 
 — with the history of your own country, at 
 least. You learned about the revolution of 
 1776 at home; by the fireside, from fathers, 
 from grandfathers ; perhaps from great grand- 
 fathers who could have almost seen the thing 
 themselves ; and they had not seen and 
 you have not heard of any revolution after 
 that. You say you have read our histories, 
 the standard authors. There's Bancroft ; — 
 that he does not tell you of a revolution in 
 1787 or thereabouts, and in his recent volumes 
 specially devoted to the History of the Consti- 
 tution, in the opening sentence says that 
 
Oj a Revolution. 
 
 oo 
 
 "when thirteen republics formed themselves 
 into one commonwealth, there was no revolt 
 against the past, but a persistent and healthy 
 progress." And so with all those who before 
 him had written on the history of the country. 
 Well, without wishing to cast a slur on that 
 venerable man and his contemporaries or their 
 predecessors, the fact is — that the nearer a 
 man lived to those times the less he may have 
 known about them ! 
 
 But before looking about for any revolution 
 in 1787, coincident with " the adoption," it is 
 interesting to reflect, that if there was any, at 
 that time, it was not the first after that of 
 1776 ; at least not if, for this occasion, we allow 
 an usurpation to be called a revolution ; which 
 last term we generally reserve for changes of 
 which we approve, employing usurpation to 
 designate those we discountenance. With 
 this understanding, we must know that there 
 had been a revolution after the separation 
 from Great Britain, that is between 1776 and 
 1787. Those thirteen "States" — as we may, 
 just for once, call them, for convenience, — 
 which in the Declaration of 1776 were spoken of 
 as unitedly sovereign and independent, and in 
 3 
 
34 The Centennial 
 
 1783, in the treaty of Paris were acknowl- 
 edged, by the former sovereign of thirteen col- 
 onies, as holding in union those powers in war 
 and in peace which characterize a national ex- 
 istence, " had usurped the powers of the na- 
 tion." Because, as we must now perceive, 
 those thirteen colonies had not been, because 
 in the nature of political science they could 
 not have been, the actors against Great Britain 
 in that revolution. They vapored immensely 
 in calling a Congress, sending delegates, in- 
 structing them, declaring this and that. But 
 really they did not achieve independence or 
 anything else of a political nature. They were 
 no parties in the war. A mob of men, which, 
 for grandeur, we must call The People or a 
 Nation, forcibly repressing the voices of others, 
 citizens or subjects like themselves, who might 
 differ on the question of their common inter- 
 ests, assumed the sovereign right of war and 
 so constituted themselves the possessors of 
 national dominion in those Colonial territories. 
 The colony or State, or its government repre- 
 senting colony or State, we must understand, 
 had nothing to do with this so-called revolu- 
 tion against the crown of England. In fact, 
 
of a Revolution. 35 
 
 this was neither rebellion nor revolution ; least 
 of all was it such on the part of any pre-exist- 
 ing political personality whatever. We have 
 learned from good authority,* what it was — 
 " It was the development of a sentiment of 
 national unity and independence throughout 
 the population resident within the thirteen 
 colonies along the Atlantic coast from New 
 Hampshire to Georgia; then the assembly in 
 Philadelphia of the representatives of this en- 
 tire population . . . this assembly of the young 
 Nation's representatives it was which protested 
 first, then waged war against the royal sov- 
 ereignty and government ; and finally after two 
 years of existence declared, as the representa- 
 tive of the whole People and by the authority 
 of the whole People, the independence of the 
 United Colonies. What now was the relation 
 of the individual colony to the Nation, and to 
 the Nation's representative — the Continental 
 Congress ? The united People had, through the 
 
 * The Political Science Quarterly. A Review Devoted to 
 the Historical, Statisical and Comparative Study of Politics, 
 Economics and Public Law. Edited by the Faculty of Polit- 
 ical Science of Columbia College. Article The American 
 Commonwealth. Vol. I. pp. 18, 19. (March, 1886). 
 
36 The Centennial 
 
 Continental Congress, asserted their sov- 
 ereignty. They were organized only in that 
 Congress. They [that is, this " People "] had 
 not as yet made any constitution vesting 
 powers or reserving powers or withholding 
 powers." 
 
 Consequently, as we must now see, — 
 " We must, therefore, determine the powers 
 of the Continental Congress by regarding it as 
 the organization of the People and the suc- 
 cessor to the British Government. In the 
 former capacity it was sovereign constituting 
 power. In the latter it was central govern- 
 ment, authorized by the general principles of 
 the devolution of powers to succeed to all of the 
 powers exercised by the King and Parliament 
 over and in the colonies ; viz., the functions 
 of international government ; of intercolonial 
 government ; and the right of participation in 
 the purely internal government of most of the 
 colonies, through the veto power upon the 
 acts of their legislatures, the ultimate revision 
 of the decisions of their higher courts and the 
 appointment of their governors and chief judi- 
 cial officers. In the former capacity, it might 
 and should have constituted a new system of 
 
of a Revolution. 37 
 
 governmental organs, both central and local, 
 with such reservations of rights and distribu- 
 tions of powers as it judged conducive to the 
 welfare of the whole people ; while in the latter 
 it should have governed with all the powers of 
 both crown and Parliament until the new 
 system was ready." 
 
 No matter about the histories we have read 
 in our school-boy days — 
 
 " By all the reasons of political science and 
 the natural devolution of powers, this was the 
 position of the Nation and its representative, 
 the Continental Congress, on the one side and 
 of the commonwealths and their local govern- 
 mental establishments on the other; and there 
 were at the moment no other reasons and 
 norms by which to measure these relations." 
 
 But most unfortunately, as it now appears, 
 though by "the permission and advice" of 
 this sovereign Congress,* " conventions of the 
 people resident within the several colonies be- 
 gan the work of framing paper constitutions 
 for their local governments, while the Conti- 
 nental Congress, busy with the waging of the 
 
 * p. s. Q., I. p. 20. 
 
$8 The Centennial 
 
 war to maintain the declared independence, 
 delayed the construction of a constitution for 
 a permanent central government which should 
 define the relation of the Nation and its gen- 
 eral representative to the states and the state 
 governments. This was the fatal error. . . . 
 So that when the plan of the new central gov- 
 ernment, drafted by the Continental Congress 
 itself, came to be established in 178 1, it pre- 
 sented the system of separately sovereign and 
 independent states — sovereign and independ- 
 ent now as against each other and not as the 
 Declaration had it, unitedly sovereign and in- 
 dependent as against Great Britain — and con- 
 nected with each other by a league of friend- 
 ship." 
 
 That is, as severally sovereign. Some of us 
 may think that it has been only as " unitedly 
 sovereign and independent " that the States 
 have ever existed at all. But the quotation 
 certainly gives the common idea of the so- 
 called Confederation. 
 
 " From provinces of the British Crown, 
 these colonial establishments had now become, 
 in name and theory at least, sovereign and in- 
 dependent States. Here certainly was muta- 
 
of a Revolution. 39 
 
 bility, construction and destruction. No one 
 can possibly claim that the relation of local to 
 central power in our system had not undergone 
 within less than a decade a complete trans- 
 formation." 
 
 No indeed ; not if the state of things at 
 the beginning of the decade was such as has 
 just been disclosed " from the stand-point of 
 political science." Here was the " usurpation." 
 Now for the " revolution." 
 
 " So far as the paper constitution [of the 
 Confederation] was concerned, this system of 
 sovereign states in league was made immuta- 
 ble. In fact, it lasted just eight years, and 
 was then overthrown by revolution."* 
 
 Yes, by revolution — the thing we called by 
 the softy name — adoption of the constitution ! 
 
 " The states had usurped the powers of the 
 Nation. They had planted themselves upon 
 ground false to philosophy, false to history, 
 and false to physical and ethnical relations. 
 These powers must be wrenched from them, 
 and they forced back into their proper subor- 
 dination. But how could it be done? The 
 
 , — — . c- 
 
 * P. S. Q. I. p. 21. 
 
40 The Centennial 
 
 existing law provided .... At length two 
 far-seeing spirits divined the means of escape 
 from the unbearable situation. These two 
 were Bowdoin and Hamilton, and their argu- 
 ment was : — The states have usurped the sov- 
 ereignty of the People of the Nation and the 
 People must reassert their sovereign power. 
 But this was revolution — revolution against 
 usurpation. Bowdoin boldly proclaimed it by 
 securing from the [usurping? What the deuce 
 had the usurpers to do in that galley ?] Massa- 
 chusetts legislature an instruction to the dele- 
 gates sent by it to the Confederate Congress 
 to move in that body for the summoning of a 
 convention of the people of the whole Con- 
 federacy to revise the constitution. But these 
 delegates were so frightened at the revolution- 
 ary character of the proposition, that they dis- 
 obeyed the command of the legislature which 
 sent and instructed them, and never presented 
 the project at all. On the other hand, the 
 more politic Hamilton had recourse to one 
 subterfuge and another ; until at last, chiefly 
 through his shrewd manipulation of opportuni- 
 ties, the best talent of the Nation was brought 
 together in secret convention, and persuaded 
 
of a Revolution. 41 
 
 to frame a constitution withdrawing from the 
 states the greater part of the usurped powers, 
 and to make an appeal to the people of the 
 Nation to establish it. The people answered 
 with sufficient unanimity ' Yea, and the Na- 
 tion reasserted its sovereignty." 
 
 You see that we can give you brave words 
 for our claiming that no revolution has taken 
 place since the adoption of the constitution, 
 because that " adoption " was itself a revolu- 
 tion which made the revolution which some 
 people think they saw a quarter of a century 
 ago an impossibility ; the needful thing hav- 
 ing been done seventy-five years before, which 
 is all we need to consider to save our centen- 
 nial for us. 
 
 This historical exposure of "usurpation" as 
 the foundation of the existence of the original 
 states, which is to be regarded as a justifica- 
 tion for revolution in the adoption of the con- 
 stitution of 1787, is not altogether new. It 
 was referred to by Pomeroy, with his sanction, 
 as having been stated by Dr. Mcllvaine of 
 Princeton, writing in 1 861. But the statements 
 which have just been recited are particularly 
 noticeable as appearing shortly before the 
 
42 The Centennial 
 
 date which we have selected for our centennial. 
 These too are especially worthy of our atten- 
 tion as being found in a Political Science Quar- 
 terly, published under the auspices of one of 
 our oldest Universities, established before the 
 beginning of the century, in the city where 
 the government contemplated under the con- 
 stitution was inaugurated on the 30th of April, 
 1789, and where fifty years afterwards the 
 semi-centennial of that event was commemo- 
 rated by an address delivered before the New 
 York Historical Society by John Quincy 
 Adams. 
 
 In that address " the old man eloquent," 
 with whom perhaps this view of the adoption, 
 as a revolution against usurping States, origi- 
 nated, presented the argument in an elaborate 
 restatement of our history from the colonial 
 era, summing up his conclusion in this passage : 
 
 " And on that day of which you now com- 
 memorate the fiftieth anniversary, on that 
 30th day of April, 1789, was the mighty revolu- 
 tion, not only in the affairs of our own coun- 
 try, but in the principles of government over 
 civilized man accomplished. The revolution 
 itself was a work of thirteen years, and had 
 
of a Revolution. 43 
 
 never been completed until that day. The 
 Declaration of Independence and the Consti- 
 tution of the United States are parts of one 
 consistent whole, founded upon one and the 
 same theory of government ; then new, not as a 
 theory, for it had been working itself into the 
 mind of man for many ages, and had been es- 
 pecially expounded in the writings of Locke, 
 but had never been adopted by a great na- 
 tion." 
 
 Mr. Adams' view is not essentially different 
 from that given us by our College. There is 
 some distinction, so far as the former presents 
 the revolution as the continuous event of thir- 
 teen years and the latter indicates the alterna- 
 tion of a " usurpation," sandwiched between 
 two revolutions. If the revolutionary doings 
 of 1776 were directed against the King of Eng- 
 land and he had got himself out of the scrape 
 by the treaty of 1783, the tail-end of Mr. 
 Adams' thirteen years of revolution, finished 
 up by "the Adoption," ought to have been 
 against somebody else. 
 
 But Adams was equally contemptuous of 
 the State existence. In the same address he 
 says : — 
 
44 The Centennial 
 
 " Where then did each State get the sover- 
 eignty, freedom and independence which the 
 articles of Confederation declare it retains? 
 Not from the whole people of the whole 
 union, not from the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence, not from the people of the State itself. 
 It was assumed by agreement between the 
 legislatures of the several States and their 
 delegates in Congress, without authority from, 
 or consultation with, the people at all." 
 
 Mrs. E. B. Browning has said, — 
 
 Every age, 
 
 Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned 
 By those who have not lived past it." 
 
 This is applicable in the present inquiry. 
 During the century just ending, intellectual 
 progress, at least the acquisition of learning 
 about matters and things in general, has been 
 wonderfully enlarged and diffused. Especially 
 has the history of the past received new illu- 
 mination. We know lots of things about what 
 had happened and even about what had not 
 happened long before our grandfathers lived, 
 that they never dreamed of. Why should not 
 we know what happened and what didn't hap- 
 
of a Revolution. 45 
 
 pen in their own time better than they could. 
 The prehistoric mounds have been opened, 
 dead tongues forced to speak, hieroglyphics 
 have been read. But these things are essen- 
 tially of the old method ; like accidental finds 
 of musty title-deeds in a worm-eaten oaken 
 chest. The critical school of history has come 
 into being and the Positive Philosophy been 
 applied to history, since Bancroft and the 
 other historians you know of, began to tell 
 their plain unvarnished tale. Myths can now 
 be explained and made to yield historic ve- 
 racity. Our land may be too young for buried 
 cities, battered inscriptions, and unknown 
 tongues of the past; but we may have had 
 our folk-lore and myths as well as people in 
 other lands. The fathers — four generations 
 ago — would swallow almost any sort of myth, 
 for real history. They lived in our heroic age. 
 They are our heroes and as such they were 
 just the sort to make myths for us — were those 
 fathers and founders. The heroes of antiquity 
 always did that way, leaving funny stories, 
 not over cleanly, some of them, about their 
 deeds and adventures, which passed for won- 
 ders, until long, long afterwards, they were 
 
46 The Centennial 
 
 explained as myths by the philosophic historian, 
 showing that the actors were really embodi- 
 ments of natural laws, forces, ideas, " physical 
 and ethnical relations," and such like. What 
 then was the biggest myth for our fathers? 
 Why, it was all in the word "Adoption." 
 They believed in adoption just as the early 
 Romans believed in the she-wolf's suckling the 
 Latin twins by Tiber's yellow waves. Each 
 hero had his little legend. George Washing- 
 ton, — there were stories about him. But the 
 revolution he was engaged in when he drew 
 his sword as commander under the tree in Cam- 
 bridge was not, as we used to think, the first, 
 last and only revolution he was up to in his 
 career. The second, we now have learned, 
 was consummated when George Guelf, of a 
 Hanoverian family, settled in England, with 
 the connivance of, or being specially incited 
 thereto by J. Adams, B. Franklin, J. Jay and 
 H. Laurens, American commissioners and 
 friends of our George and sent by that very 
 same Sovereign Continental Congress ; and 
 also moved thereto by himself, too, undoubt- 
 edly, when he interviewed Cornwallis at York- 
 town, interfered with our affairs and in the 
 
of a Revolution. 47 
 
 treaties of Paris 1782 and 1783 assumed to 
 recognize thirteen somethings, by name, New 
 Hampshire, Massachusetts, and so on, as Free 
 and Independent States ; and said that he, 
 George aforesaid, as King of England, would 
 in the future " deal with them as such." A 
 third revolution was this of 1787 — revolution 
 by adoption. Mr. Schouler, another literary 
 man, in his popular history of the United 
 States, says — " Nothing saved America from 
 perdition under the so-called perpetual league 
 but a coup de main. Happily the revolution 
 which superseded the old articles had the 
 popular sanction and was bloodless." As the 
 term coup de main indicates force, the strong 
 hand, violence, we must suppose the author 
 may have intended coup d'etat. Our George 
 may, as a boy, have suffered under a disability 
 to tell a lie. But as he was foremost in the 
 convention and to be so in the new dynastic 
 arrangement, we must believe he had sur- 
 mounted that early difficulty in the path of 
 political ambition. The adoption by the con- 
 vention was clearly a plebiscite, like those engi- 
 neered by the first and third Napoleon. 
 
 In older times those who did not like the 
 
48 The Centennial 
 
 political constitution of a country and who 
 wished to have the supreme power in an- 
 other hand than that of the actual pos- 
 sessor, had only one method of being satisfied. 
 They were obliged to effect the desired 
 change by revolution, in their own day and 
 generation. That such revolution always in- 
 volved some hazard — risk of property and per- 
 haps of life, risk of getting the ugly name of 
 "traitor" — was always taken into considera- 
 tion beforehand. Now if similarly dissatisfied 
 persons can succeed in making the past over 
 again, by pure literature, if they can, by writ- 
 ing history backwards, on scientific principles, 
 cause the required revolution to have taken 
 place before they were born in time to risk a 
 single hair, — why, this way is cheaper by a 
 good deal, and, with careful handling, their 
 revolution may do good service for a long 
 time. 
 
 " The fathers and founders," as we used to 
 call them, Washington, Bowdoin, Hamilton, 
 Ben Franklin and the rest, who were sent as 
 delegates by those simple-minded usurpers — 
 those States, were, we now see, somewhat sly 
 fellows. They had beguiled their States into 
 
of a Revolution. 49 
 
 sending them to a convention to draw up a 
 plan for a better instrument for general gov- 
 ernment, and behold, in following this instruc- 
 tion, they accomplished a revolution against 
 their principals. They settled the matter for 
 their States, if their "adoption," 17th of Sep- 
 tember, 1787, — their agreement on apian — was 
 the adoption, which was the revolution. And 
 that it was, we have admitted by choosing the 
 17th of September, 1887, as marking the cen- 
 tennial of the great event. The so-called 
 ratification by the States, by conventions or 
 legislatures, was a formality : very proper as a 
 token of State submission to the inevitable or 
 that the revolution was " peaceable," as our 
 later historians of the event term it. Mr. J. 
 Q. Adams appears to have had a somewhat 
 different opinion of the point of time from 
 which " adoption " should be reckoned ; if not 
 also as to the territorial extent of the change. 
 In the same address, he says — 
 
 "A constitution for the people and the dis- 
 tribution of legislative, executive and judicial 
 powers was prepared. It announced itself as 
 the work of the people themselves, and as this 
 was unquestionably a power assumed by the 
 4 
 
50 The Centennial 
 
 convention, not delegated to them by the 
 people, they religiously confined it to a simple 
 power to propose, and carefully provided that 
 it should be no more than a proposal, until 
 sanctioned by the confederation Congress, by 
 the State legislatures and by the people of the 
 several States in conventions, specially assem- 
 bled by authority of their legislatures for the 
 single purpose of examining and passing upon 
 it." 
 
 When Adams, in the same address, refers 
 to the two States, Rhode Island and North 
 Carolina, which did not join in ratifying the 
 constitution until after the government had 
 been inaugurated on the adoption by eleven 
 States, he represents them as not bound by 
 such adoption and as independent of that gov- 
 ernment ; if not as foreign nations. In this he 
 surrenders the assumption which is the basis of 
 his doctrine of State usurpation, as it is of the 
 statement made in the Political Science 
 Quarterly ; which is — that there was already 
 in existence a single political people or Nation, 
 which had come into being in 1776, and which 
 included the population of every one of the 
 thirteen. To suppose that it was the revolu- 
 
of a Revolution. 5 1 
 
 tionary action of this People which was exhibi- 
 ted in the adoption of the constitution requires 
 the conclusion that each State of the thirteen 
 was equally bound by it ; whenever it became 
 binding on any. Even temporary exclusion of 
 the two States would argue that the existence 
 of this revolutionizing People was the result 
 and not the cause of State adoption. 
 
 Our Quarterly is more consistent, in assum- 
 ing that the convention, as well as the Conti- 
 nental Congress represented in the fullest ex- 
 tent the power of an existing nation, which in- 
 cluded the population of each of the thirteen ; 
 while State adoption was engineered by the 
 disingenuous patriotism of a few revolutionists. 
 
 To suppose that the People, to whose will 
 adoption is to be ascribed, was at any time 
 found in eleven adopting States, only ; to be 
 increased by the people of two others only 
 when they, either as States, or as independent 
 masses of natural persons, should join in ratifi- 
 cation, is to surrender the whole position. 
 The only consistent position must be that, at 
 the moment when the constitution and gov- 
 ernment began to exist by the will of the por- 
 tion of the nation occupying eleven States 
 
52 The Centennial 
 
 each and every State of the thirteen was sub- 
 ject to it. 
 
 In a later article connected with this sub- 
 ject,* our Quarterly says with regard to the pro- 
 vision • — " The ratification of the conventions 
 of nine States shall be sufficient for the estab- 
 lishment of this constitution between the 
 States so ratifying the same," — and to the way 
 the convention introduced it to the then sub- 
 sisting Congress: — 
 
 " It was certainly a shrewd move ; and the 
 proposed method of action undoubtedly corre- 
 sponded much more nearly to the natural con- 
 ditions and relations of our political society 
 than did the provision of the confederate [old 
 confederation] constitution, applicable to the 
 case ; but from a strictly legal stand-point it 
 was a revolutionary proposition on the part of 
 the convention, and the reception and approval 
 of this proposition by the people was a revolu- 
 tionary act on their part. As tersely as I can 
 express it, what happened was this : The nat- 
 ural leaders in the nation invoked a force un- 
 
 * P. S. Q. I., p. 619 : Article by the same writer, on Von 
 Hoist's Public Law. 
 
of a Revolution. 53 
 
 known to the constitution to assert itself as 
 the sovereign power, and at the same time to 
 declare the form of organization under which 
 it would act and the majority sufficient to give 
 validity to the act, and the regularly consti- 
 tuted powers felt compelled to stand aside and 
 see this new self-constituted sovereignty oc- 
 cupy the ground. They [the natural leaders?] 
 actually put the new system into operation 
 while two of the States were still holding out 
 against its adoption, and assumed such an atti- 
 tude towards these as to make them quickly 
 feel that further resistance would be disastrous." 
 Whether the actors in this revolution — " the 
 natural leaders " — allowed the States, as such, 
 or the people as a Nation, to take this view of 
 the situation is immaterial, when we once ad- 
 mit that ''subterfuge " was their proper instru- 
 ment. .As for "the more politic Hamilton," 
 his resources in this line were equal to this 
 emergency; for, in the Federalist, No. 81, he 
 argued, as Madison and Marshall did also in 
 the Virginian Convention, that a State would 
 not be suable by its own citizens in the Federal 
 Court — being sovereign : that difficulty which 
 lias been the great stumbling block for the 
 
54 The Centennial 
 
 supreme-government theory, from the day of 
 Chisholm vs. Georgia to the day of Mr. Justice 
 Miller's reference to it in his address before 
 the Michigan Law School, June, 1887. 
 
 From the history of this revolutionary adop- 
 tion, as given by its discoverers, one might 
 doubt whether anybody at that time, unless, 
 perhaps, the gentlemen who formed the con- 
 vention and sat it out to the 17th of Septem- 
 ber, had any purpose or intention in the matter. 
 Fifty or sixty years ago, when Kent and Story 
 were living, the judges and commentators, 
 when in doubt about the interpretation of the 
 text, would hunt up the record of some of the 
 members of the convention and argue from 
 their sayings or doings that this or that mean- 
 ing was the meaning which the framers them- 
 selves intended the wording in the Constitution 
 should have. This method of interpretation 
 was, even then, more or less criticised. But 
 now-a-days we have changed all that. We do 
 not any more concern ourselves as to what 
 these agents of revolution meant by the con- 
 stitution they drafted, because, even if we at- 
 tribute the revolution to them individually, we 
 
of a Revolution. 55 
 
 should do it with the suspicion that they didn't 
 themselves know what they were about. 
 
 So a professor from another college f has 
 just told us : — 
 
 "We must also be on our guard against at- 
 taching too much importance to the way in 
 which the framers of the constitution under- 
 stood their own action and to the motives by 
 which they explained it. This is only another 
 way of saying that the intellect often lags be- 
 hind the impulses and feelings that govern 
 conduct, that men are not seldom influenced 
 by motives of which they have not given them- 
 selves an account, and that a man may even 
 become the champion of a cause the nature 
 and bearings of which he has not clearly dis- 
 cerned." 
 
 This, with many similar propositions of this 
 school of thinkers, illustrates the observation 
 of a contemporary French writer, Paul Bour- 
 get, that democracy is antagonistic to indi- 
 vidual responsibility and effort in political life. 
 
 t Professor Richard Hudson, University of Michigan, in the 
 article, State Autonomy vs. State Sovereignty, in the New 
 Bnglander and Yale Review, p. 42, Jan., 1S88. 
 
56 The Centennial 
 
 It introduces " determinism " in politics. Men 
 individually regard no one as particularly re- 
 sponsible and look on all that is done as the 
 result of fatality ; or they refer it to ideas. 
 
 It is perhaps rather singular that an earlier 
 revolution which so conveniently disposes of 
 the charge that the North, during the civil 
 war, was engaged in a revolutionary course, 
 should so recently have been discovered as 
 coinciding with the first year of the century 
 ending in 1887. Undoubtedly, many would 
 like to accept the state of things presented to 
 us, as resulting from revolution, without being 
 obliged to infer that the Fathers and Founders 
 were either disguised tricksters, or clumsy 
 puppets moved by unseen forces. For their 
 satisfaction we may try to settle the nature of 
 that which we have called, as our fathers had 
 in 1776, the Independence of the United 
 States. 
 
 We, in our generation, are not so far re- 
 moved from that date as not to know that, at 
 that time and earlier and ever since, there 
 have been in this country two political schools, 
 neither one of them favored in one section 
 more than in another, and neither peculiar to 
 
of a Revolution. 5 7 
 
 our country : because the partisans of each have 
 been seen everywhere in Europe during the 
 same period. For convenience, and in corre- 
 spondence rather with their later acceptance 
 than with their origin, we may distinguish 
 them as the English and the French schools. 
 The first, as illustrated by all writers on Eng- 
 lish Constitutional Law, rested on history, on 
 the recognition of facts known by history. 
 The second proposed to found all knowledge 
 of political fact on a statement unsupported 
 by history and received as matter of faith, 
 maintained by dogmatic assertion. In France 
 this was illustrated by each of the two great 
 political parties in deadly opposition. By one, 
 in asserting an inborn right, in members of 
 certain families, to hold the supreme power. 
 This they called the doctrine of " legitimacy, " 
 or of " divine right." But it was equally illus- 
 trated by their opponents in proclaiming that 
 the people, or nation, without limitation of 
 persons, are the sole possessors of this power. 
 If this party did not use the terms divine right 
 and legitimacy for their own doctrine, it was 
 not because they were not equally applicable 
 for it as for the doctrine of the opposing 
 
58 The Centennial 
 
 party. A recent French author remarks : " It 
 has been said with reason that there are the 
 Ultramontanes of the rights of the people and 
 the Jacobins of divine right. I do not see 
 much difference between those who invoke 
 the inalienable and imprescriptible right of 
 popular sovereignty, in support of universal 
 suffrage, and those who assert the inalienable 
 and divine right of a family or chief, in sup- 
 port of absolutism."* 
 
 Sir Henry Maine, in his last workf ob- 
 served : — 
 
 "The enthusiasts for popular government, 
 particularly where it reposes on a wide basis 
 of suffrage, are actuated by much the same 
 spirit as the zealots of Legitimism. They as- 
 sume their principle to have a sanction ante- 
 cedent to fact." 
 
 Each of these dogmatic contestants equally 
 disregarded facts. As to the basis of their 
 respective doctrines, they differed only as one 
 had originated in the theological period and 
 the other in the metaphysical period of politi- 
 
 * Adolphe Prins, Professor in the University of Brussels, 
 in La Democratie et la Regime Parlementaire. 
 t "Essay on Popular Government." p. 20. 
 
of a Revolution. 59 
 
 cal speculation ; recognized as successive by 
 M. Auguste Comte, into whose third, which is 
 presumptively the final period, that of the 
 " Positivists" enlightened by the positive polit- 
 ical science, we are now to be inducted by 
 philosophers who can discern usurpations and 
 revolutions in past centuries by their innate 
 appreciation of the necessity of things neces- 
 sary, of physical and ethnical relations, forces, 
 ideas, etc., a philosophy of determinism, in 
 which the will of each and every individual 
 person comprehended in their nation or people 
 is passive. But what this will require of us 
 individually, as subjects, we shall always learn 
 from these Comtists, or positive philosophers. 
 Personal sovereignty may become obsolete; 
 but this political science will answer its pur- 
 pose. 
 
 Our statesmen and particularly our lawyers 
 when acting as statesmen, and these have for 
 the most part, been lawyers, have never been 
 distinctly of either the English historical or 
 the French dogmatic school ; and so have 
 appeared as of one or of the other, as seemed 
 convenient for the occasion. This is notably 
 true of Story and of Webster — the Dioscuri of 
 
6o The Centennial 
 
 Northern Political Theory. In some instances, 
 accepting what they supposed to be the histor- 
 ical fact — the separate sovereignty of each of 
 the original thirteen States, they represented 
 the constitution as the result of a contract be- 
 tween those States to maintain a federal organ 
 of government. In others, in harmony with 
 the dogmatic metaphysical school, they as- 
 cribed it to the people or nation acting as 
 superior and sovereign, by divine right, as to 
 the States. 
 
 But, for the most part, they have not, in 
 these last instances, thought of placing the 
 Nation's birth at 1787, or, in the former, of 
 ascribing the existence of the States, before 
 that date, to usurpation at some date after 
 1776, and the national supremacy, after the 
 adoption, to the revolutionary character of that 
 event. If they rested on the sovereignty of 
 the people, they asserted it as visible without 
 interruption from 1776; or, if they asserted 
 the original sovereignty of each of the thirteen 
 States, they regarded it as commencing at the 
 same point of time. 
 
 It has, however, been very common with the 
 older champions of supremacy in the Federal 
 
of a Revolution, 6 1 
 
 Government, as founded on popular sover- 
 eignty, to combine dogma and history in 
 some fashion like the following formula : 
 
 Whereas, I, N. N., do hold, as matter of 
 faith and dogma, that no government can ex- 
 ist which may not be attributed to the known 
 will of the people or nation, as Rousseau and 
 the French school understand it, or as John 
 Locke had taught it before, and yet have ac- 
 cepted a commission as (Mr. Justice, Senator, 
 or other officer, N. N.) under a constitution of 
 government which I know had the force of 
 law only after it had been ratified in eleven 
 States by conventions chosen by majorities of 
 the State electors ; I, as scholar, commentator, 
 or jurist, commit myself to saying that, in 
 this action of the several majorities of persons 
 voting under the particular laws of the several 
 States, I recognize only the action of the peo- 
 ple of the whole country or the nation, as 
 superior to each and every State ; being herein 
 influenced, as patriotic citizen, by the appre- 
 hension that it is only by such doctrine that 
 the right of State secession can be denied, or 
 various public measures, which I think desira- 
 ble, can be engineered. 
 
62 The Centennial 
 
 This sort of confession of faith has been 
 often employed, and has done very good service 
 for more than half a century. 
 
 But any statement, as of a fact, which is 
 possible in the nature of things, is better than 
 a sophism, which is against the nature of logic. 
 
 What a blessed thing it would have been for 
 old Story if he could have recognized J. Q. 
 Adams' revolution-discovery in his own time, 
 and anticipated its development by the later 
 schools of political science ! 
 
 Whatever the original country of the sover- 
 eign people doctrine may be, there is at least 
 one Frenchman who denies its visibility in the 
 history of our adopted constitution. M. E. 
 Boutmy, the founder and director of the exist- 
 ing Ecole libre des Sciences Politiqucs in Paris, 
 in a recent work, 1885, on " The Constitutional 
 Laws of France, England, and the United 
 States," has said of our constitution: " This 
 is the main fact. Here, the American people 
 is the artificial element, and, so to speak, 
 created by a higher power. It is so far from 
 making the Federal Constitution that it results 
 from it. The effectual constituting power is 
 exercised by the several States, the only power 
 
of a Revolution. 63 
 
 then in existence. It is these States which 
 are met in every line of the text, laboring to 
 take back in detail what they had granted in 
 gross to the national element." 
 
 Such criticism is the more remarkable as 
 coming from a country where the dogma of a 
 sovereign people has, for the greater part of 
 the last hundred years, at intervals, stood for 
 the political constitution ; and most French- 
 men assume that the American revolution of 
 1776, and the French revolutions since 1791 
 are equally founded on that basis. To their 
 minds our sovereign people have been equally 
 visible in the Continental Congress, in that of 
 the Confederation, and in the adoption of 
 1787. This being the doctrine now resulting 
 from the discovered revolution of that last 
 date, we may listen to another French friend 
 whose treatise Lcs Etats Unis pendant la Guerre, 
 founded, he says, on personal observation and 
 acquaintance with our leading men, has been 
 well received by the French public ; thus see- 
 ing ourselves in a good French mirror. 
 
 Each State, says M. Laugel, " in fact repre- 
 sents in the American republic only an admin- 
 istrative subdivision. It is just what a depart- 
 
64 The Centennial 
 
 ment in France might be, if only the prefects 
 were changed into governors named by the in- 
 habitants, the general councils into deliberat- 
 ing chambers for legislating on departmental 
 concerns. It may be truly said that, as to ad- 
 ministration, the State is everything ; that, po- 
 litically, it is nothing." 
 
 The instructors among ourselves, to whom 
 we have been listening, might say that this 
 statement corresponded at least to the republic 
 of their anticipations. 
 
 In the brief record since the day when thir- 
 teen English colonies first presented themselves 
 before the world as constituting a single na- 
 tional power, there are two great events, which, 
 as American Legitimists, we shall always be 
 called to reconcile with our divine right of 
 popular sovereignty. 
 
 The earliest of these was when — just after 
 this same adoption of September, 1787 — the 
 plan agreed on in the convention of framers, 
 for governing the entire population in many 
 relations of common interest for every na- 
 tion, was candidly submitted to each one of 
 thirteen political bodies then recognized by 
 the world as holding together — in a voluntary 
 
of a Revolution. 65 
 
 union and not severally — all the powers ever be- 
 longing to any independent nation: a plan 
 framed for them, though without precise in- 
 structions from them as to its general nature, 
 by good men and true ; selected by themselves, 
 separately, and afterwards presented to them, 
 severally, to accept or reject as members of 
 that pre-existing union — in and by which and 
 only so — each of them had had any interna- 
 tional recognition or any capacity, as a politi- 
 cal personality, to accept or decline any such 
 plan, and when, through the majority voice of 
 the qualified electors, represented in special 
 conventions chosen by such electors, in a cer- 
 tain number of such political bodies, capable 
 in union of sustaining such plan by force, this 
 plan was accepted and, for that reason, or on 
 that basis as authority, was put in operation as 
 the supreme law for all the people of the thir- 
 teen States of that pre-existing union. 
 
 This action, or fact cognizable in history as 
 a political event, culminated in the inaugura- 
 tion in the city of New York, April 30, 1789, of 
 the first President of the United States, which 
 was commemorated in that city fifty years 
 afterwards, when the address by Mr. Adams, 
 5 
 
66 The Centennial 
 
 entitled The Jubilee of the Constitution was 
 delivered before the New York Historical 
 Society. 
 
 When shall such hero live again ? And, if 
 such is around now, will our Historical Society 
 present him for its celebration of the second 
 Jubilee ? 
 
 The later event was when, in 1861— 5, certain 
 political bodies, identical in nature with those 
 earlier thirteen, and remaining in their original 
 voluntary union, with the intention of sustain- 
 ing by force that same plan of government, — 
 an intention shown by the action of majorities 
 of their qualified electors in continuing to 
 elect Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen to 
 constitute an organ of national government, 
 and in raising armies at their call, did — as 
 such political bodies in union, and not other- 
 wise ; not as a mere mass of population or as 
 " the men of 1881-5," or as a crowd prompted 
 by their own private notions of right and 
 wrong — enable the persons so elected to main- 
 tain and continue that plan of government 
 over territory and population, that had been 
 under eleven similar political bodies which had 
 rejected their former participation with such 
 
of a Revolution. 67 
 
 others in sustaining the position of a sovereign 
 political entity or nation. 
 
 In each of these critical periods a govern- 
 ment was, to all appearance, voluntarily sup- 
 ported by certain pre-existing States ; that is, 
 supported in a different sense of the word from 
 that in which it is said of the action of persons 
 who, as subjects, support a governing person 
 as matter of loyalty or duty. For, except as 
 these States were there, giving the elective 
 franchise to their respective voting citizens, 
 neither President nor Congress would have 
 existed, to constitute such government. 
 
 The older event our professors of Political 
 Science explain as a revolution, by unconscious 
 revolutionists, against themselves — those thir- 
 teen political personalities whose intelligent 
 action in the matter had formerly been 
 assumed by the unscientific historians. 
 
 The more recent event must now, and quite 
 as easily, be explained as a continuation of the 
 same revolution ; in which all those "relics of 
 usurpation," the States — each and every so- 
 called " State " were again the victims. There 
 are many doubtless who would like to ascribe 
 this, as well as the earlier event, to a popular 
 
6& The Centennial 
 
 demonstration, the self-assertion of the sov- 
 ereign many, " the Uprising of a Great People " 
 as an enthusiastic French friend has called it. 
 In each instance they would attribute a politi- 
 cal result to the wills of some bundle of units 
 of human beings living in the country at these 
 two periods, without even stating that they 
 have knowledge of a majority or minority of 
 such units then living and favoring either one 
 of these two events, or how such a majority or 
 minority could have a political right to bind 
 the others, not included in such majority or 
 minority. 
 
 But it is far neater work to get our revolu- 
 tionary basis well established on the credit, or 
 discredit, of a few fathers and founders three 
 quarters of a century before the last event. 
 Others, who have not this clear view of our 
 early history, are obliged to ascribe to "the 
 men of a generation now passing away," to 
 " the men who revised the constitution in 
 1863-5," who gave it its " final sanction," that 
 sort of patriotic chicanery which the Political 
 Science Quarterly tells us was used by the 
 framers' in 1787. The eminent newspaper 
 whose explanation of the later event we have 
 
of a Revolution. 69 
 
 listened to, does not, in terms, ascribe to " the 
 men of 1863-5 " the identical political thauma- 
 turgy which is to excite our admiration in the 
 case of Hamilton and his contemporaries; 
 but, by saying that they " turned the answer 
 of the people to its proper account," it leaves 
 room only for a similar conclusion. For it is 
 no more possible in the later event than it is 
 in the earlier, to find the action or answer of 
 the people, without finding it in the action or 
 answer of certain of the States. 
 
 If there was any revolution when the con- 
 stitution of 1787 became the law of the land, 
 it was not the act of any aggregation of peo- 
 ple or of a nation as such. It took place at 
 the moment when eleven States assumed that, 
 as matter of political fact, above all law, an 
 administration, as provided for in that instru- 
 ment which they as States had ratified, would 
 by their authority, as so many States forming 
 in Union a political sovereign unit, exercise 
 the specified powers in the whole territory of 
 the thirteen States, whether the remaining 
 two should or should not, after reasonable 
 time for consideration, by joining in the rati- 
 fication, continue with them in the possession 
 
JO The Centennial 
 
 of the unitary sovereign power ; as they had 
 the political right to do, by being already 
 members of that pre-existing political unit. 
 
 The reason, or theory, or explanation for 
 this being in the historical fact that sovereign 
 power has never, since the revolution or con- 
 quest of 1776, been held by any State, except 
 as one of a number voluntarily united, with 
 ability and purpose to maintain unitary 
 sovereign power over all territory internation- 
 ally recognized at the time as that of the 
 United States. 
 
 If there was any revolution in 1861-5, it was 
 not in the action of any aggregation of individ- 
 uals distinguishable by opinions from other 
 inhabitants, nor in that of any nation as a pop- 
 ulation known geographically ; it must have 
 been in the fact that certain (Northern) States, 
 being voluntarily united in supporting their 
 federal government as agent or instrument, 
 assumed to do, as The United States, consti- 
 tuting a sovereign unit, what the eleven States 
 in 1787-9, would have had the right and power 
 as a political unit to do, and did, thereupon, in 
 the civil war maintain the powers delegated 
 to the federal government under their sole 
 
of a Revolution. 7 1 
 
 authority and will, at that time expressed in 
 the constitution, over the whole territory and 
 population of the States, including that of 
 eleven (Southern) States that had relinquished 
 the only right of dominion which any State 
 had ever possessed ; that is — the political right, 
 as members of one political unit, to sustain in 
 Union a federal government while exercising 
 local government ; which States, therefore, in 
 accordance with such pre-existing investiture 
 of sovereignty, were practically treated as Ter- 
 ritorial districts and became States again by 
 re-admission. 
 
 But in neither of these events was there any 
 revolution. There was no forcible shifting of 
 the possession of sovereign power : because 
 the possession of sovereign national power by 
 States voluntarily in union and not otherwise, 
 nor severally, had been, as political fact above 
 law, above science, above reason for that mat- 
 ter, the basis of all national existence from its 
 beginning in the revolution of 1776. 
 
 In either event it was not revolution but evo- 
 lution ; the necessary development and contin- 
 uance of one pre-existent national state, in 
 which the entirety of any nation's sovereign 
 
7 2 The Centennial 
 
 power was, as matter of fact known by history 
 and not by doctrine or science, held and exer- 
 cised by a union of " States," individually dis- 
 tinguishable by mutual recognition as volunta- 
 rily sustaining, by force, their united possession 
 of this power over all territory which had at 
 any time been held as included in States or 
 Territory of that Union. 
 
 Hobbes said, some time ago, that when rea- 
 son is against a man, then the man will be 
 against reason. And it may be said as well, 
 that when facts are against a man, then the 
 man will be against the facts. Somebody has 
 said that we cannot escape history. But the 
 positive philosophy of our college friends 
 shows us that nothing is easier. 
 
 Appearances, we know, are deceitful. In 
 appearance, each State — that is, certain elec- 
 tors using their franchise to elect a representa- 
 tive government, a right held by each voter 
 individually by a State law resting on the will 
 of other such voters in the same State as a sep- 
 arate political person or body — had held, and, 
 in appearance, continued to hold political 
 power, while in a voluntary union with other 
 similar States and never otherwise. Such 
 
of a Revolution. *]$ 
 
 States, being in a voluntary union and never 
 otherwise, have from first to last, appeared 
 holding the power of an independent nation 
 over a domain geographically distinguished as 
 States and Territories of such union, and, for 
 one hundred and twelve years, have in conse- 
 quence of this appearance, been recognized by 
 the rest of the world as holding that power, 
 not severally, but only as that voluntary union. 
 
 Appearances are deceitful. Hence, skepti- 
 cism is always necessary to clear the ground 
 for a foundation for a faith of some sort. The 
 first object of any revolutionary school must 
 be not so much "to inspire belief " as to excite 
 a more or less modest skepticism : even if it 
 leads us to question some of those lectures on 
 our political history with which the Justices of 
 the Supreme Court nave occasionally enriched 
 their legal " opinions." 
 
 Nobody undertakes to say whether the Jus- 
 tices of the Supreme Court, while repeatedly 
 describing our political system as M an inde- 
 structible union of indestructible and immuta- 
 ble States," supposed or did not suppose they 
 were recognizing our legitimist doctrine of 
 States subject to a sovereign Government, or 
 
74 The Centennial 
 
 to a sovereign People. But, by their profess- 
 ing to acknowledge the eleven members of the 
 so-called Confederacy as continuing States of 
 the United States during the Civil War and 
 the Reconstruction era, their political dictum 
 seems to tally with the theory of a sovereign 
 President, Congress and Judiciary, holding in- 
 dependent power over each and every State. 
 If accepted as political fact, it lays a good 
 foundation for the theory. It follows that 
 any State may be treated in the same style — 
 as a Territory, practically — on the judgment 
 of the same sovereign Government. 
 
 Our professors of Political Science appear 
 to have understood the dictum of the Court as 
 a re-assertion of State sovereignty, rather than 
 of the opposite ; and, while urging a plea for 
 11 skepticism in politics," very logically, on 
 their own theories, flout this attempt to make 
 history by judicial decision, when the position 
 of States and the Government can be explained 
 scientifically by positive philosophy. It really 
 matters not what was done in reference to 
 those disturbed districts. States they were 
 not, after engaging in secession ; because they 
 had not been States before that time. 
 
of a Revohction. 75 
 
 Whether there was a State or a people of a 
 State, one hundred years ago, to have a mind 
 of its own — or was not — neither State nor peo- 
 ple of a State could continue after that revo- 
 lution of 1787. " There is really no such thing 
 as the people of a commonwealth [State] in a 
 sound view of our political and social system ; 
 there is only the people of the Nation residing 
 within the commonwealth. The People is a 
 national conception and preserves its integrity 
 against government only as a Nation."* 
 
 As now enlightened, it must seem to us also 
 " that the great vitiating principle of the most 
 of our political and judicial reasoning is this 
 dogma that our political system is an inde- 
 structible union of immutable States ; " that 
 it "is an abstraction which has no warrant 
 either in history or present fact or tendency," 
 and " that the perpetuity of our Union [what- 
 ever that may be when there are no States to 
 be united] depends primarily upon the exist- 
 ence of certain geographical relations and eth- 
 nical conditions, "f 
 
 We were much annoyed, during the civil 
 
 *P. S. Q., I., p. 25. * P. S. Q., I., p. 12. 
 
j6 The Centennial 
 
 war troubles, when some English advocate of 
 the Southern secession claims spoke of " the 
 United States" as only "a geographical ex- 
 pression," not indicating any real political ex- 
 istence. But now we can say exactly the 
 same thing ; only with a totally opposite ap- 
 plication. 
 
 Our folks should long ago have been done 
 with that word, the States, for, " so thorough- 
 going was the change which the relation be- 
 tween state and Nation now suffered [in the 
 revolution by adoption, 1787] that we cannot 
 longer properly speak of our local organiza- 
 tions as states, but as commonwealths, i.e., 
 local governments containing under the sover- 
 eignty of the Nation and the supremacy of 
 the Nation's general governmental representa- 
 tive, a large element of self-government."* 
 
 So Pomeroy made a point of using common- 
 wealth, for State. 
 
 But how we shall be any safer or make the 
 world any wiser by saying " commonwealth,' 
 we may not see, as yet, especially as the 
 name has long been used and before the 
 
 * P. s. Q., I., p. 23/ 
 
of a Revolution. Jj 
 
 adoption, by two of the oldest and proudest 
 of the thirteen ; but whether the name be 
 jessamine or jimson-weed, the flower smells 
 sweet or stinks, all the same. Probably, we 
 may keep the name United States as designat- 
 ing " the Nation's general governmental rep- 
 resentative " only, and parse it as a noun, 
 singular, as Professor Pomeroy and others 
 have done. 
 
 " Putting together " say our college friends, 
 in conclusion of an argument to which no ad- 
 miration of ours can do justice, f " all these 
 principles, facts, and tendencies — physical, eth- 
 nological, historical, legal, and political — how 
 can we any longer declare the cardinal doc- 
 trine of our system to be ' an indestructible 
 union of indestructible and immutable 
 States ? ' Are we not dealing in mere ab- 
 stractions when we say so ? Are we not 
 giving way to an exaggerated Platonism in 
 our political philosophy: attempting to substi- 
 tute ideas for things, instead of seeking to 
 find ideas in things ? " 
 
 Well, of course, we must say — Aye ! Our 
 
 t P. S. Q., I., P . 34. 
 
7 8 The Centennial 
 
 instructors in Political Science evidently mean 
 that we shall. There are probably some less 
 well-tutored individuals who would think that 
 attempts of this sort are illustrated in this 
 argumentation quite as much as in the propo- 
 sition so contemptuously denounced. 
 
 The existence of the States must have been 
 another myth from our heroic age ; at least 
 after that " usurpation " of theirs came to an 
 end in the adoption, which was State suicide 
 all round. The admission of new States after- 
 wards has been a delusion. Indeed that acute 
 Anglo-American, Mr. Moncure Conway, has 
 already catalogued our belief in the existence 
 of such monstrosities as one of our various 
 " Republican Superstitions." We now, as 
 true legitimists, shall receive as object of 
 loyalty the population of an earth-surface, 
 without regard to any particular method of 
 expressing authority. Our People of the 
 United States continues its political existence 
 by natural generative increase; just as any 
 multitude of human beings continues in Asia, 
 Africa or a Terra Incognita by having " physi- 
 cal and ethnical existence," for to such a 
 people our teachers attribute " governmental 
 
of a Revolution. 79 
 
 existence," independently of any or all States, 
 united or disunited, with the will to hold and 
 exercise power, even unconsciously, since they 
 have discovered that this was shown in the 
 revolutionary adoption of 1787. 
 
 There is as much substituting ideas for 
 things when a political scientist evolves the 
 Nation, having innate power, out of his own 
 consciousness, or by his going "back of the 
 constitution into the domains of geography 
 and ethnography, the womb of constitutions 
 and of revolutions, to ask there for the princi- 
 ple of perpetuity in any political union," as 
 there is in the social compact, or the glittering 
 generalities of the 4th of July orator.* 
 
 Yet we are not to fancy that to sustain, in 
 the future, our sovereign Nation theory we 
 shall have to content ourselves with those 
 Rousseau commonplaces about natural rights 
 and natural equality which served for gilding 
 and varnish in the Declaration of 1776, and 
 which the primitive Justices of the Supreme 
 Court — Wilson, Jay, Marshall and others — 
 would twaddle about whenever they got 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 13. 
 
So The Centennial 
 
 balled-up in their political disquisitions on the 
 authority of the written constitution. John 
 Quincy Adams, in his Jubilee and various 4th 
 of July orations, found his sovereign people in 
 a supposed contribution from all the Toms, 
 Dicks and Harrys of their individual nature- 
 given independence; a people made by the 
 assumed consent of each inhabitant. That 
 was well enough fifty years ago and for fifty 
 years before that. It was the philosophy of 
 the century. 
 
 But a philosophy that can discern a revolu- 
 tion after the lapse of a hundred years has no 
 need of such a clumsy and antiquated con- 
 trivance. There was a revolution and the 
 people did it. Therefore there is a Sovereign 
 People. 
 
 Our Quarterly says with just discrimina- 
 tion:* 
 
 " Every student of political and legal science 
 should divest himself, at the outset, of this 
 pernicious doctrine of natural rights, accord- 
 ing to which each individual, or the popula- 
 tion of any section, is practically authorized to 
 
 * P. S. Q., L, p. 17. 
 
of a Revolution. 81 
 
 determine in what his or its rights consist. 
 Natural rights are at best but the ethical 
 feeling as to what rights should be, and the 
 more individual or particularistic that feeling 
 is, the less, as a rule, is it to be trusted; while 
 the more general it is, the more it is to be 
 relied upon ; " Good ! and here comes in the 
 Nation having a consciousness and a will — 
 " and when it originates in the Nation's con- 
 sciousness, it has the moral persuasiveness 
 behind it which influences the Nation's will 
 to transform it into rights. Until this hap- 
 pens however, the assertion of rights is but an 
 ignorant boast or a disloyal threat." 
 
 Well said, indeed ; and now, in the next 
 place, how is the assumed Nation — our Na- 
 tion — to manifest its consciousness and will, 
 unless by the pre-existence of certain individ- 
 uals holding what we call supreme political 
 power over others? And how are any of us 
 to know of such, as matter of palpable, tangi- 
 ble fact — the States having gone to Ballyhack ? 
 
 Would you like to know? Of course you 
 would. Well, then, did you ever hear of the 
 Commune ? 
 6 
 
&2 The Centennial 
 
 Communism we have all heai of, and of 
 Communists, good, bad, and indifferent, from 
 the days of the twelve Apostles to those of 
 Owen, Fourier, Mr. Henry George, Dr. Mc- 
 Glynn, and such. But their plans for manag- 
 ing capital by common participation in labor 
 and profit have nothing to do with Commune 
 — in the sense of municipality, or city, ward, 
 or township of the New England pattern. 
 Community has rather much variety of senses ; 
 but we may use it as a temporary equivalent 
 for the word we would have to borrow from 
 our French examplars. 
 
 States, that is our " States," as we used to 
 say, " commonwealths," rather, have no exist- 
 ence in the nature of things. They have not 
 even boundaries, for the most part, more than 
 surveyors' lines. 
 
 " No one knows now, by anything which na- 
 ture has to show, either in geography or 
 ethnology, when one crosses the line which 
 separates two commonwealths from each other. 
 The two natural elements in our system are 
 now the Community and the Nation. The 
 former is the point of real local self-govern- 
 ment, the latter that of general self-govern- 
 
of a Revolution. 83 
 
 ment; and in the adjustments of the future 
 these are the forces which will carry with them 
 the determining power. The commonwealth 
 government is now but a sort of middle in- 
 stance."* 
 
 " Determining power " — consciousness and 
 will — if these cannot be manifested by a 
 population of individual human beings called 
 " Nation," they may be by the Communities. 
 
 All this is genuine French doctrine, and of 
 the latest mode de Paris. It is the doctrine 
 that in 1870 cowed the respectable bourgeois of 
 Paris under a gang of ruffian citoyens and en- 
 abled these, in the name of La Commune, for 
 months to make face against the improvised 
 government which claimed unlimited author- 
 ity, as had all the governments since 1791 — 
 Republican, Monarchical, Imperial — in the 
 name of the divine right of the French nation. 
 
 We remember how De Tocqueville, who was 
 said to have revealed the United States to Eu- 
 rope by his Democracy in America, thought 
 he had discovered in the self-governing town- 
 ship of the New England States, the real 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 33- 
 
84 The Centennial 
 
 unitary possessor of ultimate sovereignty ; as 
 near the French idea of Commune as anything 
 we have on hand at present. 
 
 And how are we, nous autres Americains, to 
 know where Nation begins and Commune end.-, 
 or where Commune begins and Nation ends ? 
 Why, plainly enough, by " reasons of political 
 science and the natural devolution of powers." 
 And if all who are the sovereign-many are not 
 up to this sort of thing we, at least, in our 
 commune have our College and scientific fel- 
 lows to our hand, who will do even more than 
 furnish plans of government and constitution, 
 for us to adopt, " when so dispoged," but who 
 will tell us, ex cathedra, what is and what shall 
 be as easily as they have told us what has 
 been, by a philosophy of determinism, ex- 
 cluding all personal choice, either of one or of 
 millions. 
 
 A recent German writer on public law has, 
 as we are told, said, " Ours is a period in which 
 abstract ideas of the state and of man are be- 
 ginning to exert again the sway held by them 
 in 1789, 1830, and 1848." And the comment 
 made on this, in a later number of this same 
 "Political Science Quarterly' is : 
 
of a Revolution. 85 
 
 " It is well that, at such a time, a great pub- 
 licist, such as Professor Schultze, should chal- 
 lenge our idealism and call us back to history 
 and present fact. He does not hesitate to de- 
 nounce the theory of atomistic popular sover- 
 eignty as error, and to present the state — the 
 political people in organization, no matter how 
 small a proportion of the population that 
 may be — as the true and actual, and only 
 legitimate sovereignty." * 
 
 We cannot say whether this critique, which 
 is by the same writer, is given as harmonizing 
 with the Sovereign Nation doctrine of the arti- 
 cle in the first number. The sovereignty 
 which is not " atomistic popular sovereignty " 
 must, if there are no States to hold it, be held 
 by communes. 
 
 Whether that which the German calls error 
 be error or not, it is well illustrated by the 
 partisans of American legitimacy who proclaim 
 the sovereign-many, and, instead of giving 
 history for proof, advance a title by divine 
 right of the people, under the metaphysical 
 garnish of sovereignty by idea. They claim 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 502. 
 
86 The Centennial 
 
 to have presented historical "principles, facts, 
 and tendencies " with others, all bunched to- 
 gether as " physical, ethnological, historical, 
 legal and political," for basis of an induction , 
 but it is not any such recognition of the his- 
 torical succession of instances of actual power- 
 holding as has hitherto been taken for the 
 basis of political knowledge by English and 
 American publicists. The historical facts they 
 rely on are such as the story of physical dis- 
 covery records — facts in geology, climatology, 
 anthropology, ethnology, cosmology, psychol- 
 ogy and every other 'ology. They give such 
 facts as steamboats, railroads, telegraphs, and 
 telephones, as establishing the matured devel- 
 opment of a centralized political existence, no 
 matter where power was located when the 
 written constitution was made law, and such 
 means of intercommunication were wanting. 
 It is nothing to them that State governments 
 have existed here, or that governments such as 
 monarchies, oligarchies, and federal republics 
 have existed elsewhere from time immemorial. 
 Such history is not science. 
 
 This school of scientific politics presents 
 ideas as entitled to loyal submission, no mat- 
 
of a Revolution. &j 
 
 ter whose ideas they may be ; but with the 
 implication that only those who entertain cer- 
 tain ideas are to constitute the sovereign peo- 
 ple or Nation. They do not say thoughts, that 
 would be giving away the whole thing, by 
 suggesting at once that there must be some 
 thinkers. It might look too cheeky to assert 
 plumply that they who so think have a 
 monoply of thinking. 
 
 But whether ideas floating in our circumam- 
 bient atmosphere, like bottomless cherubs, all 
 head and wings, or thoughts put forth by 
 living beings like ourselves, have been success- 
 fully at work on our political corporeity, mat- 
 ters little. Nor does it matter much whether 
 it has been only since 1861, or from way back 
 in 1787 ; nor whether the transformation be 
 called revolutionary — as resulting from some- 
 body's will, or by a determinism for which 
 nobody is responsible — w r e are concerned 
 with the question only as bearing directly on 
 the inquiry whether there is now anything 
 political which has had a continuing existence 
 since 1787. 
 
 When we have come to seeing that the 
 ideas which we are henceforth to accept as 
 
88 The Centennial 
 
 determining our political rights and duties, so 
 far as we shall have any, were the ideas ex- 
 ploited by the working agents in what was 
 called " the Adoption," and that this adoption 
 was Revolution, then we begin to know that 
 Revolution has been the continuing action ; 
 that Revolution is the thing whose duration in 
 time and space we have to celebrate : — Revolu- 
 tion, which has had its Anniversaries and its 
 Jubilee and a Centennial, and may yet have 
 Centennials or Jubilees or Anniversaries. 
 
 It is well for us all, in our time, not to be 
 ignorant of the purposes of those " fathers and 
 founders " whose merit we must recognize if 
 we celebrate our anniversaries with any show 
 of exultation — merit of some kind — though 
 perhaps Hamilton was only a patriotic charla- 
 tan, and Washington could sing falsetto when 
 there was occasion. We may leave to another 
 jubilee or centennial the question whether 
 "the men of 1861-5 " who, we a/e told, re- 
 modelled the imperfect mechanism of the men 
 of 1787, were equally contemptuous of the 
 people whose sovereign will they professed to 
 execute. Perhaps there have been American 
 statesmen who could say, with some of an- 
 
of a Revolution, 89 
 
 tiquity — populus vult decipi, et dccipiatnr : it is 
 the few who do, and the many who are done. 
 
 But it concerns us and those who shall come 
 after us much more to know the conditions of 
 political existence under which we now live, 
 whether established one hundred years ago, or 
 during the civil war; or, at any time, through 
 discovery by political science. As far as con- 
 cerns this matter, the historical questions of 
 time and ancestral virtue are of no importance ; 
 and if any can show us our real situation and 
 the nature of that which here answers to al- 
 legiance and what is now, for us individually, 
 loyalty, he need not trouble himself or us about 
 dates and anniversaries. " Let the dead past 
 bury its dead." Shall we not gladly hail any 
 such, and above all any who, like the teachers 
 to whom we have been hearkening, have the 
 courage of their opinions ? And, here we may 
 recall a remark by De Tocqueville : * 
 
 " It must not be forgotten that the author 
 who wishes to be understood is obliged to 
 push all his ideas to their utmost theoretical 
 consequences and often to the verge of what 
 
 * De Tocqueville : "Democracy;" Introduction, p. iS. 
 
90 The Centennial 
 
 is false or impracticable ; for, if it be necessary 
 sometimes to depart from the rules of logic in 
 action, such is not the case in discourse, and a 
 man finds it almost as difficult to be inconsist- 
 ent in his language as to be consistent in his 
 conduct." 
 
 What then is now that political personality, 
 begun in Revolution one hundred years ago, 
 and improved in strength and stature by con- 
 tinuing Revolution since 1861, whose duration 
 we could celebrate as centennial, though there 
 was no hundredth year of a continuing adoption 
 by States continuing to exist after that revo- 
 lutionary birth? 
 
 The personal creature then born and since 
 developed by revolutionary vitality is our Sov- 
 ereign Central Government — not an adminis- 
 trative government, or instrument under the 
 will of an existing power-holder, but a gov- 
 ernment per se, a government of persons, or by, 
 or in persons ; as absolute in reality and in all 
 possible manifestation, by deeds, as any the 
 world knows of : — persons regulating them- 
 selves, in ordinary or quiet times, more or less by 
 a pledge, in a form of words called a " constitu- 
 tion," and continuing their governmental exist- 
 
of a Revolution. 91 
 
 ence as in accord with that form of words ; but 
 being, to themselves, the only reason for follow- 
 ing that pledge and the only judge of that ac- 
 cord. There being no other visible persons 
 consciously holding political power, those who 
 constitute this government at any particular 
 moment hold all power and are accountable to 
 none. 
 
 If the people, as found in the political cor- 
 porations called the States, existing in union as 
 one sovereignty, as political fact before any 
 written constitution, without dependence on 
 any but themselves as States united, — each 
 on all and all on each, maintaining one sov- 
 ereignty as voluntarily united, — do not hold 
 the ultimate power of a nation among nations, 
 there is no people at all to hold it; because, in 
 the nature of things, no people, merely as in- 
 habitants of a portion of earth-surface, ever 
 could consciously exercise such power or be 
 known as a nation among nations. The con- 
 ception of a people or nation discernible by 
 the metaphysical humanitarian as existing in 
 a mass of human beings more or less discrimi- 
 nated by race, language or sympathies from 
 other masses, and located between these or 
 
92 The Centennial 
 
 those lines of physical topography, like rivers, 
 seas or mountains, which would be convenient 
 as political frontiers, may have aided with 
 other motives in stimulating revolutionary 
 action ; but, as a basis for political recognition, 
 it is a fancy generated from the European con- 
 tests of the present century. 
 
 Our professors of Political Science have told 
 us that the commonwealth government is now 
 but " a sort of middle instance." To know 
 what that means we shall probably have to 
 apply to the professor of Logic. Our Quar- 
 terly adds — 
 
 " Too large for local government, too small 
 for general, it is beginning to be regarded as 
 a meddlesome intruder in both spheres — the 
 tool of the strongest interest, the oppressor 
 of the individual. This has been its history 
 in other lands and other times ; and the mere 
 fact that it professes to be popular here, while 
 it has been princely or aristocratic elsewhere, 
 will not save it from the same fate."* 
 
 It was John Austin, whose keen insight 
 showed him, long ago, that, as the several 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 34. 
 
of a Revolution. 93 
 
 States as corporate bodies, being united, as 
 political fact above law, had always exercised 
 every jot of political power there was to exer- 
 cise — they, so constituting a unit, were like an 
 oligarchy in respect to the people or nation as 
 a mass of individuals. If the discovery is pro- 
 claimed — that the continued existence of such 
 a unity of such States is hostile to the liberties 
 of the individual, the proof must rest on the 
 idea that such a unity is identical with an 
 oligarchy composed of single natural persons, 
 princes or nobles ; or else on the idea that 
 every possession of sovereign power is incom- 
 patible with individual liberty, which last 
 notion, indeed, is identical with that which is 
 axiomatic in our Quarterly — the assumed sov- 
 ereign people or nation — or the assumption 
 that there can be no possession of sovereignty 
 other than one which is imaginary. An axio- 
 matic proposition well suited to a continuous 
 revolution. 
 
 Can it ever be the case with us that some 
 one hereafter will say, as De Tocqueville of 
 his own country — " I perceive that we (in 
 France) have destroyed those individual pow- 
 ers which were able single-handed to cope with 
 
94 The Centennial 
 
 tyranny, but it is the government that has in- 
 herited the privileges of which families, cor- 
 porations and individuals have been deprived ; 
 to the power of a small number of persons, 
 which if it was sometimes oppressive was often 
 conservative, has succeeded the weakness of 
 the whole community." 
 
 If a number of these States, or common- 
 wealths — if anybody likes that better — being, 
 as matter of fact, in a voluntary political union 
 independently of any written provision for a 
 General or Federal Government, as administra- 
 tion, have not, at each point of time, held all 
 sovereignty as a nation, whether displayed in 
 Federal or State Government, there has been 
 no people or nation at all to " preserve its in- 
 tegrity against government," because, except 
 as one of a definite number of persons holding 
 the elective franchise by the will of the cor- 
 porate State, no living man has consciously 
 held recognized power as against any govern- 
 ment whatever. We may perhaps assume 
 that power against government such as has 
 been claimed by the outlaw, the brigand, the 
 communard, the petroleuse, the Anarchist, to 
 say nothing of the late Mr. John Brown, of 
 
of a Revolution. 95 
 
 Ossawottamie, or " his soul," is not the sort 
 which our ancient, respectable, and very well 
 endowed college would, at present, recommend 
 as that by which the People or Nation shall 
 manifest its existence. 
 
 This is as true now as it was one hundred 
 years ago, when if there was revolution on the 
 part of anybody, the people, by the showing 
 of these teachers, had nothing as a nation to 
 do, consciously, in bringing it about, and the 
 government then instituted derives no author- 
 ity from them and is as little responsible to 
 them as the Russian Czar is to the nation of 
 Russians. 
 
 Is it nothing for us to know, no matter how, 
 if we do but know it, that the government that 
 appeared to our fathers as an administration, 
 acting for a known and visible superior, recog- 
 nized by the world as United States, has really 
 been in possession of all sovereign political 
 jurisdiction from its first revolutionary seizing 
 the reins of power, whenever it was, and that 
 it is now our self-sufficing master and ruler? 
 
 But the constitution ! — you say. But the 
 Supreme Court ! — you say. The constitution ? 
 As what? As law? For whom is it law? 
 
96 The Centennial 
 
 For this government ? for certain actual per- 
 sons, being the President, the Congress, the 
 Judiciary, for the time being ? Is the Consti- 
 tution law for them, they being the sovereign? 
 Sovereign because there is no visible, tangible 
 person in existence — the States being gone to 
 the dogs — to make it law, except as that gov- 
 ernment exists. It is not a law on ox for them, 
 but a law by them. What is it more than a 
 pledge, octroye'e by that government, by which 
 it proposes to continue its own existence, 
 being itself the only judge of its fulfilment of 
 that pledge ? 
 
 And this Constitution of ours : is it really so 
 generated out of the nature of things as to be 
 very nearly supernatural? Did it cause its 
 own existence? self-created? self-sustained? 
 Has not a German, Professor von Hoist, " in 
 that invaluable work upon our constitutional 
 history," which starts out with our French 
 dogma — legitimacy of a sovereign-people — 
 " devoted an entire chapter to what he terms 
 1 the canonizing of the constitution,' i.e., the 
 making of a political bible out of it ; all doubts 
 as to the absolute truth and perfection of 
 which " are regarded as heresy? " The irony 
 
of a Revolution. 97 
 
 of the learned Professor is certainly merited. 
 During- the first decades of this century, the 
 never changing aspect of the Nation's leaders, 
 mutely prostrate in credulous worship before 
 the great fetish of our Political System, is, to 
 say the least, touching."* 
 
 So say our Professors. Webster! Daniel! 
 Giant shade ! forgive them ! 
 
 This constitution-business was another of 
 those myths that our fathers so delighted in — 
 like the Adoption myth. Now, when the 
 adoption by thirteen States is an exploded 
 fiction, why should the nominal object of 
 adoption be any longer venerated ? What is 
 there now of sacredness in its oracles ? Unless 
 it be left in the few words of the Preamble — 
 "We the People " — so long triumphantly pro- 
 claimed as the all-sufficient testimony to that 
 origin which our scientists have now shown the 
 adoption to have been — revolution and nature 
 of things, now one hundred years continuing 
 — always represented by a government origi- 
 nally called " federal " by worshippers of the 
 great constitution-fetish? 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 8. 
 
98 The Centennial 
 
 And the Supreme Court ? — " In all the ex- 
 citements of bitter contests, involving great 
 financial interests, power, position, and even 
 political existence, in fact everything which 
 could properly be brought within its judicial 
 cognizance, the people have always felt that 
 their interests were safely entrusted to its 
 charge."* So says Mr. Justice Miller, in his 
 address to the Law-graduates of Michigan Uni- 
 versity, and we will all. say with him in his 
 concluding sentence — "That the court may 
 long continue to deserve this confidence, as it 
 has for the past hundred years, must be the 
 desire of every patriotic citizen." 
 
 The claim for the Court, to have faithfully, 
 as tribunal, upheld the application of the con- 
 stitution as law for those subject to law, may 
 be proudly sustained. But what will be its 
 position as umpire when it is itself identified 
 with a body of persons holding the only power 
 in the land which can be called sovereign, 
 because not held by delegation from a per- 
 sonal superior, and themselves the only power- 
 holders to make the Constitution law for any- 
 
 * P. S. Q., pp. 9, 35. 
 
of a Revolution. 99 
 
 body ? A court adjudicating between parties 
 before it, in cases under known law, and a 
 body whose opinions can determine future 
 relations between distinct political-power-hold- 
 ers, being itself identified with one of them, 
 are two very different tribunals. 
 
 In ranking political existence with " every- 
 thing which could properly be brought within 
 its judicial cognizance," the honored judge 
 probably had in mind those cases, during the 
 civil war and after, in which the court affirmed 
 the sonorous apothegm — " an indestructible 
 union of indestructible States," which our Col- 
 lege Quarterly treats as fantastic idealism. 
 
 Political existence, in any true sense of the 
 words, is a matter of fact ; not a relation under 
 law or determinable by courts of law. From 
 those famous cases, in which we were puzzling 
 Europe by insisting on the treason of the citi- 
 zen while affirming the belligerent sovereignty 
 of his State, Americans may have concluded 
 they have solved the problem in politics which 
 Rousseau compared with the quadrature of the 
 circle in geometry — to find a form of govern- 
 ment which shall place law above man. If our 
 judiciary thought the written constitution ade- 
 
ioo The Centennial 
 
 quate for this solution, it may be an illustra- 
 tion of Diderot's remark — " Les plus mauvais 
 politiques sont communcment les juriscousultes, 
 parce qitils sont toujour s tentc's de rapporter les 
 affaires publiques a la routine des affaires priv- 
 ees. 
 
 Fact — basal political fact— fact of existing 
 power and will to make law — was and is and 
 always will be the thing wanted ; and this fact 
 is now, for us, in our day, revealed. Adoption, 
 federal compact, social compact, and every 
 other fiction and fantasy shall be swept off to 
 the limbo of busted superstitions. The fact is 
 made known by Political Science — the fact of 
 Revolution — a people continuing in a Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Our anniversaries being thus secured to us, 
 as marking the continued duration of some- 
 thing the nature of which we are just begin- 
 ning to understand, how shall we Americans 
 worthily celebrate a centennial ? 
 
 Will any say that all we had, personally, to 
 do was to score one hundred and go on our 
 way rejoicing? To smile over it if we liked 
 it, or ignore it if we did not ? But though we 
 all have wished to celebrate this first centen- 
 
of a Revolution, 101 
 
 nial, if not for the credit of our forefathers, at 
 least for our own self-complacency, why should 
 we not also, even yet, celebrate it in the hope 
 that, by so doing, those who are destined to 
 follow us may be more secure of like anniver- 
 saries and like centennials ? Was it enough to 
 have made the Bird of Freedom scream and 
 fly aloft in our old vain-glorious style ? Can 
 we not now, in the year between 1887 and 
 1889, do better by doing what those fore- 
 fathers may be supposed to have been doing 
 in the year between 1787 and 1789; by forcing 
 ourselves to look at the consequences which 
 should logically have followed and may yet 
 follow that revolutionary change which they 
 and w r e called " adoption " ; confessing how far 
 r/c may yet be from their full fruition and then 
 pledging ourselves to promote it ? Our college 
 authorities explain that their object is not at 
 this time " to inspire belief, but to excite scep- 
 ticism." Scepticism in what ? In our Ameri- 
 can jingoism, diawvinism — our spread-eagle- 
 ism? No; perhaps not so much in that. 
 That they may as well let us keep for use in 
 the later progress of the Revolution. But 
 scepticism as to our own intelligence, in not 
 
102 The Centennial 
 
 advancing more steadfastly in the same glori- 
 ous path. 
 
 Now really, are not one hundred and odd 
 years long enough, even in a nation's life, to 
 be going about under an alias ? Where is the 
 sense in anybody's saying " United States " 
 when there are no " States" to be united : no 
 voluntary union between the simulacra that 
 have been so miscalled ? Even if there is 
 nothing to which the name, as a noun plural, 
 is suited, it is stupid to give the name to a 
 Central Government, as many of our Legiti- 
 mists like to do, by way of gentle insinuation 
 that the sovereign known among nations by 
 that name is found in the President, Congress 
 and Judiciary for the time being. These 
 names — States, Federal States, United States, 
 are shadows ; silly ghosts haunting the de- 
 cayed abodes of the usurpers of 1781, which 
 now beguile and betray credulous souls. 
 
 But, as names after all, are not things, these 
 may pass some time longer ; if not for conven- 
 ience, yet for old acquaintance' sake. There 
 are other things, more essential, as lingering 
 assertions of the old usurped power, which 
 should not be left to puzzle and misdirect sue- 
 
of a Revolution. 103 
 
 cessive generations as they have those of the 
 last century in the matter of loyalty and alle- 
 giance. Why should the personnel, the embod- 
 iment of the only real holder of sovereign in- 
 dependent power, if any such embodiment is 
 supposable in a Revolutionary era, depend for 
 its very existence on the caprice of certain 
 folk selected and qualified, individually, as 
 electors, by themselves corporately — as being 
 "commonwealth," or self-constituted State? 
 How confusing to minds of even average intel- 
 ligence is this bizarre arrangement ■ that an 
 actually sovereign Government, the only possi- 
 ble representative of the only possible sover- 
 eignty, should derive its very existence from 
 the continued good-will and diligence of some, 
 as in 1 861-7, if not of all, of a lot of subject 
 corporations. Think " of the immense change " 
 made in " the relation between the State and 
 the Nation in the new system " inaugurated 
 by the revolutionary adoption of 1787, accord- 
 ing to our Quarterly, which appears to accept 
 the common notion that, as historical fact, 
 each State of the thirteen could, before that, 
 claim several independence as a sovereign 
 nation. 
 
104 The Centennial 
 
 Y In the first place sovereignty could no 
 longer be claimed as a state attribute, nor 
 separate independence. Sovereignty resided 
 alone in the people of the whole Nation and a 
 state could be legally bound in organic changes 
 against its will. In the second place, it with- 
 drew all of the really political functions from 
 the states and vested them in the Nation's 
 governmental representative : viz., — the powers 
 of war and peace, of diplomacy and commerce, 
 the regulation of internal intercourse, of 
 finance and the monetary system, of the mili- 
 tary system and of the local governmental sys- 
 tern [that is, of what we used to call the State 
 government]. It left to the states thus mainly 
 jural and police functions."* 
 
 How absurd then that such an apparently 
 "real political function" as determining the 
 continued existence of the very government 
 now vested with all the really " real political 
 functions " should remain with these shadows 
 of states, these commonwealths. 
 
 This silly discrepancy in the work of the 
 revolutionist fathers of 1787 is, with two 
 
 . 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 22 
 
of a Revolution. 105 
 
 others, like the constant affirmation in a 
 monarchical country of the claims of a fallen 
 dynasty; yet — "For seventy-two years, only 
 the span of a single human life, we lived under 
 this relation of commonwealths to Nation. 
 For seventy years we imagined it per- 
 manent and perfect, when suddenly the iron 
 logic of events demonstrated the fact that still 
 too much had been left under the control of 
 the local organizations, and that the Nation 
 must narrow still further their sphere of 
 action/'* 
 
 Something was effected in 1865-7, in the 
 direction of nationalizing the whole of our 
 private law, by limiting the powers of all these 
 " local organizations," North and South, by 
 constitutional Amendments. This seemed to 
 be of some importance, even then. But some 
 time or other we shall find that — 
 
 " Here was another immense change in the 
 relation of commonwealth to Nation. . . . 
 By this last change the commonwealths have 
 been substantially assigned to the office of 
 administering the system of private law be- 
 
 * P. S. Q., L, p. 23. 
 
io6 The Centennial 
 
 tween persons resident within their bounds 
 and supplementing its defects, and exercising 
 the police power in behalf of the community 
 [commune f] against the too wide extension of 
 individual rights — all upon the basis, however, 
 of fundamental principles prescribed by the 
 Nation, and upheld by the Nation's organs of 
 central government. In the way, however, of 
 their complete relegation to this position stand 
 three things. The first is their large control, 
 legislative and administrative, over the elec- 
 tions of the organs of the central government. 
 The second is the election of the members of 
 the national senate by the commonwealth leg- 
 islatures. And the third is the equal repre- 
 sentation of the commonwealths in the na- 
 tional senate. The first may be changed, ex- 
 cept as to the election of the electors of the 
 national executive, by a simple law passed by 
 the national legislature. The second, and that 
 part of the first not subject to the legislation 
 of Congress [qualification of voters, perhaps?], 
 may be changed by the general process of 
 amendment prescribed in the constitution. 
 But the third is the stronghold of confederat- 
 ism, and most probably cannot be changed 
 
of a Revolution. 107 
 
 save by a revolutionary act. They are all 
 relics of the usurpation of 1781."* 
 
 We used to think the late Professor Pomeroy 
 a pretty stiff legitimist for his day. But with 
 all his talk about the Nation as the sole au- 
 thority for any constitution, and his qualified 
 acceptance of the discovery of revolution in 
 1787 against State usurpation, he, rather in- 
 consistently perhaps, still fancied the States as 
 having powers to give or withhold. He had 
 not enough sand, quite, for the continuing 
 Revolution. He said, — 
 
 " It is certainly however, an anomaly, that 
 the general government of the United States 
 should have no control over its own delegates 
 in Congress ; that it should be powerless to 
 define the qualifications of congressional elec- 
 tors. It must be conceded that this is a de- 
 fect in our organic law which needs amend- 
 ment. It was a necessary and unfortunate 
 concession to the theory of State sovereignty 
 and independence. One code of rules should 
 certainly prevail throughout the country to 
 regulate the choice of representatives, and this 
 
 * P. s. Q., I., pp. 23-24. 
 
io8 The Centennial 
 
 should be the work of Congress or of the 
 people in its sovereign capacity. The nation 
 should dictate in the selection of its own legis- 
 lators. The integrity of the States is suffi- 
 ciently guarded by allowing to each an equal 
 voice in the Senate, and by permitting them 
 to appoint Senators and to control the selec- 
 tion of Presidential electors. The more 
 national branch of Congress, that which comes 
 directly from the people, should be entirely 
 under the management of the one body politic 
 which is represented in the general govern- 
 ment." 
 
 Pomeroy was only giving his own idea of 
 political expediency. He did not pretend to 
 declare the political right or power as our 
 Quarterly does. But how could he, poor man ! 
 while still dreaming of "the integrity of the 
 States?" What an ancient fossil he was, to 
 be sure ! 
 
 That the Senate of the United States is 
 composed of two Senators from each State — 
 is a " relic of usurpation" as suggesting the 
 existence of a confederacy of equals. But it 
 is the method of electing Senators, that is, by 
 the State legislatures, that more essentially 
 
of a Revolution. 109 
 
 deserves the opprobrious designation. For 
 nobody has yet discovered a constitutional 
 clause authorizing the Central Government to 
 secure its own duration, so far as the Senate 
 is concerned, by interfering in the electoral 
 action of the State legislatures. Senators 
 might still be said to represent the State or 
 " commonwealth," as such, when chosen di- 
 rectly by the voting people. But, in the 
 golden future, when the electoral action of 
 that people is regulated, as well as the posses- 
 sion of the electoral franchise, by the central 
 legislature — then, when the State legislatures 
 have been compelled to surrender their 
 usurped power, the Central Government may 
 feel itself a continuing personality, like any 
 other sovereign. 
 
 It is the independence of the State in choos- 
 ing senators ; not the fact that in the Senate 
 the States are equally represented ; that is 
 incongruous with the claims of a superior cen- 
 tral existence. If there is any necessity or 
 advantage in having two houses for the busi- 
 ness of a central legislature, or national parlia- 
 ment, there are a dozen ways for producing 
 either one, without distinguishing it as being 
 
1 1 The Centennial 
 
 a relic of usurpation and popular blindness 
 more than the other. 
 
 This position of a Government, in respect 
 to its ability to provide for its own existence, 
 — if it be a sovereign government as distinct 
 from the agent or instrument of some external 
 possessor of sovereignty — is such a strange 
 anomaly that those in France who there 
 would advocate some representative system, 
 are probably unable to conceive of its exist- 
 ence. There, where there is nothing to cor- 
 respond to our " relics of usurpation" — States 
 as we used to think of them — and where 
 there are only the Depart ements, the Govern- 
 ment for the time being takes care of itself, 
 by taking charge of the so-called Constitution. 
 
 Why should not our Central, or Imperial 
 Government, as some like to call it, secure 
 its own continuance by providing for, regu- 
 lating and, if need be, compelling the action 
 of voters in electing the persons to constitute 
 its successors in its various branches and at 
 the same time require their assent, as State, 
 to an Amendment sanctioning this ? Indeed, 
 was not this done, virtually, in the case of 
 some eleven ''commonwealths" which, if we 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 i 
 
 are not ready to throw overboard the political 
 opinions of the Supreme Court, as unscientific, 
 were States, at the time, as much as the 
 others ; that is, if there are or were then any 
 such " relics " hereabouts ? 
 
 Will any say — But these were of the wicked ? 
 Somebody had to decide on that. Somebody 
 will have to decide on the nature and degree 
 of wickedness. If the Central Government 
 was sovereign in that instance and accountable 
 to none, why not equally in respect to any 
 State? Did not the Supreme Court, during 
 the Reconstruction era, repeatedly say that 
 there was a "political department" of the 
 Government, having the power to decide on 
 such a question ? 
 
 Again, such being the source and founda- 
 tion of all power, civil or military, executive. 
 legislative, and judicial, how can government 
 here rest squarely on its true basis — a uniform 
 folk or population — if a group of five or six 
 puny " commonwealths " still calling them- 
 selves States, send the force of ten or twelve 
 members to the Senate, when there are a 
 dozen others, each with a present or prospec 
 
1 1 2 The Centennial 
 
 tive population larger than this entire bunch 
 of States, sending only two apiece ? 
 
 Funny? to be sure ; but there's a constitu- 
 tional pledge on that point, given to each 
 State ! Quotha ? well, yes ; to States and that 
 was put in by those framers only because 
 common folks, when summoned to ratify the 
 constitution in 1787-8, didn't see the Revolu- 
 tion in it and very likely supposed that there 
 were States then, and that States there would 
 be, thereafter. But where is the pledge for 
 commonwealths? Our Professors indicate 
 that, if unreasonable, in not conforming them- 
 selves to the philosophical and physical and 
 ethnical basis of the Nation, any such petty 
 corporations will insist on the consideration 
 accorded in the usurpation time to the States 
 whose position they claim to have inherited, 
 some more revolution will be in order, speak- 
 ing rather mixedly ; that is, not a whole revo- 
 lution, perhaps, but a little more of the same 
 sort, to be called adoption perhaps, or perhaps, 
 a reconstruction. But as the loudest in main- 
 taining the sovereign Nation doctrine have 
 been found within their boundaries, at least 
 since the time of Mr. Adams' Jubilee oration, 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 3 
 
 it may be expected that this little group of 
 commonwealths would cxultingly unite in 
 conforming themselves to our Legitimist doc- 
 trine, by renouncing some portion of their 
 oligarchical prerogative. 
 
 These suggestions do not call our attention 
 to mere legalized abuses, ignored immoralities, 
 permissive ignorances, or to injustices like 
 civil or social disqualifications, or monopolies, 
 or favoritisms for some spheres of activity to 
 the disadvantage or destruction of others. If 
 such can be, where all are called free and 
 equal, since all human government is imper- 
 fect, yet reformation in the line of the pursuit 
 of happiness may be expected from a supreme 
 legislative in new ways ; as well as by distribu- 
 tion of surplus-revenue in quarters where it 
 may do most good. The anomalies we have 
 been talking about are dislocations, congenital 
 malformations, structural faults in the body- 
 politic, requiring heroic treatment to save life. 
 
 It would be strange however, if, incidental 
 to these, there were not grave disorders, waste- 
 ful of energy and preventing the free action of 
 the vital forces of the republic. 
 
 What a waste of time and money, to say 
 8 
 
1 1 4 The Centennial 
 
 nothing of nerves and brains, in what we call 
 the law. Why must there be a complete sys- 
 tem of private law — law regulating relations of 
 persons in private life, as distinct from the 
 public or constitutional law — in each State or 
 commonwealth, big or little ? Why must 
 each have its loads of statute-books and of 
 volumes of reported decisions, which have no 
 authority beyond the State limits ? The com- 
 mon-law of England was said, with some 
 truth, a century ago, to be a general law 
 among the States ; yet only so far as not af- 
 fected by State legislation, State customs and 
 State judge-made law. How much community 
 of old English common-law remains now in 
 State jurisprudence? Just now there is a call 
 for codes to displace all " common " law. 
 That means a code-civil and code-criminal for 
 each State ; each one costing thousands to the 
 State in its production ; benefiting lawyers by 
 the thousand. Are human conditions so dif- 
 ferent in different States ? Think of the six 
 New England States, homogeneous in feeling 
 and interests, with six separate jurisprudence- 
 apparatus. The French code-civil superseded 
 the various laws of the provinces of old France 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 5 
 
 and, in Napoleon's time, was carried into ad- 
 joining countries, German and Italian, differing 
 in race and language, and there remains. 
 Think of the domestic relations, of the various 
 laws of inheritance. Where would the Mor- 
 mon question be to-day if there had been a 
 national law of marriage and divorce ? Who 
 gets the best out of all this but the constantly 
 increasing tribe of pettifoggers ? 
 
 What is citizenship but rights under law? 
 One citizenship — one law. W T as there any one- 
 citizenship under the phrase — (Article IV. of 
 the constitution of 1787) — "The citizens of 
 each State shall be entitled to the privi- 
 leges and immunities of citizens in the sev- 
 eral States;" that is — such as they might 
 be by the law of the several States? Local 
 jurisprudence was restricted at that time, more 
 or less, by some other provisions in that con- 
 stitution. Is there any more one law for citi- 
 zenship now? Is there any more national citi- 
 zenship now ? Now, when after seventy-two 
 years of weak self-complacency, always holding 
 up the blessings of local self-government to 
 the envious gaze of the effete monarchies, 
 " the iron logic of events," that we have just 
 
1 1 6 The Centennial 
 
 heard about, demonstrated the Nation's obli- 
 gation to clip the political wings and talons of 
 the local organizations ? Did the Nation do 
 more, by affecting their sphere of action in pri- 
 vate law, when, by Article XIV. of Amend- 
 ments : — 
 
 " It now placed bounds to their wide-reach- 
 ing powers in the domain of the jural and 
 police regulations, by making citizenship 
 national, decreeing the equality of civil rights, 
 and limiting the whole of their authority by 
 the principle of the due process of law as in- 
 terpreted by the national judiciary. Here was 
 another immense change in the relation of 
 commonwealth to Nation."* 
 
 What a sad thought — that the Supreme 
 Court was not up to this " immense change " 
 when the appeal was made to it by those revo- 
 lutionist brethren who were hanged, as Anar- 
 chists, under Illinois State-citizenship law, last 
 autumn ! 
 
 Perhaps the Court might have taken a differ- 
 ent view of such an appeal, some ten or fifteen 
 
 * P. s. Q., I., p. 23. 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 7 
 
 years before ; for we shall be called to notice 
 that— 
 
 "For ten years now (1886) we have been 
 passing through a period of reaction against 
 the pronounced nationalism of the previous fif- 
 teen."" 
 
 Though perhaps it was the National legisla- 
 ture that should have first set to work, if — 
 
 " There is now really nothing further neces- 
 sary, in the domain of constitutional law, to 
 enable the Nation's governmental organs to 
 nationalize, in fundamental principle, the 
 whole of our private law, just as there is noth- 
 ing further necessary than the existing provi- 
 sion imposing upon these organs the duty of 
 maintaining republicanism in our local forms, 
 to enable them to nationalize at almost every 
 point, the whole of our public law."f 
 
 In a later article in the same Quarterly, par- 
 ticularly directed to this aspect of our legal 
 future, and contributed by another member of 
 the same Faculty, we are told — 
 
 " Whether it be by change of constitutional 
 interpretation or by direct constitutional 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 25. t P. S. Q. I, p. 23. 
 
1 1 8 The Centennial 
 
 amendment, there is no doubt, I think, that the 
 Nation will find a way to make its law national. 
 No theory of State rights, no jealousy or fear 
 of centralization, will prevent so practical a 
 people as ours from satisfying its real needs." * 
 
 But how or why distinguish between public 
 and private law in any relation between the 
 Nation and the commonwealths? Does pri- 
 vate law become public by being engrossed in 
 a State constitution ? What are State consti- 
 tutions now-a-days but imperfect codes ; by 
 removing so many specified relations of pri- 
 vate persons from the ordinary power of the 
 State legislatures? 
 
 "The legislatures in nearly all of these re- 
 cent instruments have been deprived of their 
 previously almost unlimited powers of legisla- 
 tion upon most important subjects, such as 
 the raising and appropriating of money, the 
 exercise of the right of eminent domain and 
 the creation of corporations?" f 
 
 Instancing these, our Quarterly says % — 
 
 * P. S. Q., III., p. 164. Article, State Statute and Com- 
 mon Law. 
 t P. S. Q., I., p. 28. 
 J P. S. Q., I., p. 30. 
 
of a Revolution. 1 1 9 
 
 " To these must then be added scores of pro- 
 visions prohibiting absolutely legislative action 
 in regard to certain subjects, requiring it abso- 
 lutely in regard to others, fettering special 
 legislation and making wide-reaching excep- 
 tions from its scope of action." 
 
 Then as to the State Governor. He too is 
 shown up as having fallen off " in dignity, im- 
 portance and power," if at a more intermittent 
 rate. But this difference indicates something. 
 We may say — 
 
 " That he has lost far less than the legisla- 
 ture during the last forty years : which is one 
 more evidence of the fact that the true sphere 
 of the commonwealth government is adminis- 
 tration rather than legislation. Nevertheless, 
 he is not regarded either by the Nation or by 
 the part of it resident within the particular 
 commonwealth, as the important personage 
 that he was before 1861."* 
 
 By the part of the Nation, that is, we must 
 suppose, by the whole population of the State, 
 whether voters or not, but holding political 
 power as a piece of sovereign nation. For, as 
 
 * P. S. Q, 1., p. 31. 
 
120 The Centennial 
 
 for the fancy that the voters, holding the fran- 
 chise under their own State law, who freely 
 enacted these constitutional changes and who 
 could change them back, being a distinct polit- 
 ical power — that notion of the old usurpation 
 time must go with the rest to the tombs of the 
 Capulets. 
 
 As for the fact that " these recent constitu- 
 tions have decreased the dignity and influence 
 of the commonwealth judiciary," it is all mat- 
 ter of daily newspaper comment, and so we 
 can leave it ; only remembering this hint, that, 
 if the sphere of the State judiciaries has lost 
 less by State-constitutional limitation than the 
 other branches, " this is again evidence of the 
 principle that the sphere of the commonwealth 
 government is administration rather than legis- 
 lation, and judicial administration more than 
 executive administration."* 
 
 Such being the facts, we are taught to draw 
 an inference, founded indeed on the theory 
 that a State of the Union always was what it 
 was only as its administrative government was 
 what it might be ; there being, as we have 
 
 * P. s. Q., I., p. 32. 
 
of a Revolution. 1 2 1 
 
 been shown, no such thing, really, as a polit- 
 ical people of a State, but only a portion of 
 that population which we call " the Nation." 
 We are told : — 
 
 11 It cannot be doubted that we have in all 
 this a great decline in the dignity, influence, 
 and power of the commonwealth legislatures, 
 and therefore {therefore?] of the common- 
 wealths themselves. It is unmistakable that a 
 stronger consciousness of nationality, a larger 
 confidence in the national government and a 
 pronounced distrust of the commonwealth 
 governments have taken possession of the 
 whole people, and are now realizing them- 
 selves in the constitutional and legal transfor. 
 mations of our entire political system."* 
 
 The writer in our Quarterly, in the sam^ 
 article, also says — 
 
 " The commonwealth is purely a creation ot 
 law and is identical with its political organiza* 
 tion. I am endeavoring, by this analysis, to 
 lead up the mind of the reader to the proposi- 
 tion that when the people resident within the 
 commonwealth withdraw powers from the 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 30. 
 
122 The Centennial 
 
 government of the commonwealth, the result 
 is practically a change in the position of the 
 commonwealth and not simply a redistribution 
 of powers between different organs of the 
 commonwealth."* 
 
 As the State or commonwealth is now to be 
 held to exist only as its local government 
 may subsist, it may not be very clear where 
 the powers thus abstracted from State govern- 
 ments, singly, from time to time, by the peo- 
 ple of a State, or piece of the Nation, are to 
 go. In the times of our ignorance, " confi- 
 dence in the national government " was shown 
 only when three-fourths of the States united 
 in placing power in its hands ; while simul- 
 taneously withdrawing it from each and every 
 State. If the doctrine of conservation of force 
 applies in political as in physical science, the 
 powers now withheld from the organs of 
 States, by their recent state constitutions, ought 
 to be somewhere ; lying round loose, perhaps, 
 in our revolutionary era, to be picked up by the 
 Central Government, in the sweet bye-and- 
 bye. But though the people, so called, of a 
 
 * P. S. Q., I, pp. 25, 26. 
 
of a Revolution. 123 
 
 State, so called, has been maiming itself while 
 maiming its local government, the same peo- 
 ple, so called, may, at the same time be 
 obliged to recognize the Commune, wherever 
 that may be discernible, as the only other al- 
 ways possible depositary for the time being : 
 since, by the axioms of our political science, it, 
 beside the Nation, is the only natural political 
 reality. So we are told to observe that : — 
 
 " These more recent instruments [State 
 constitutions] contain provisions constitution- 
 alizing the municipal divisions of the common- 
 wealth, i.e., defending them in greater or less 
 degree, against the power of the government 
 of the commonwealth, securing their bounda- 
 ries, establishing their organizations, defining 
 their powers, prescribing the tenure and duties 
 of their officers, etc. This is a most serious 
 question. It demonstrates the fact that the 
 government of the commonwealth has ceased to 
 be in many respects the natural local govern- 
 ment It threatens the dissolution of the com- 
 monwealth through the consolidation of the 
 municipalities." (Note " Counties and Cities ").* 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., P 32. 
 
124 The Centennial 
 
 Our teachers would have us observe : — 
 
 " That while the legislative and judicial 
 powers exercised at the beginning of the cent- 
 ury by the governments of the common- 
 wealths are gravitating towards the national 
 government in greater or less degree, the 
 police powers, on the other hand, are passing 
 over to the municipalities, and that this result 
 is being produced as much by dissolution from 
 within as by centralization from without, if 
 not more."* 
 
 So we see that while the former States have 
 been surely, though quietly, approximating to 
 the political status of a French De'partement 
 under a central head — King, Emperor, or As- 
 sembly — there is a local absolutism, in the 
 hands of irresponsible majorities, gradually 
 forming, which may find its exemplar in those 
 peasant communities (the Mir) in Russia, de- 
 scribed in Tolstoi's novels ; which have consti- 
 tuded the political liberty of Tartar races 
 whenever their nomad state was merged in a 
 territorial settlement. 
 
 When we think of New York or Chicago as 
 
 * P. S. Q., I., p. 33. 
 
of a Revolution. 125 
 
 commune, under the irresponsible management 
 of something like a board of Aldermen, we re- 
 call old Marshal Bliicher's admiring sugges- 
 tion, when, after Waterloo, his English friends 
 showed him around London — " Mein Gott ! 
 was fur Pliindern ! What a city for to sack ! " 
 Truly, " This is a most serious question" — 
 for somebody. 
 
 We begin to learn from all this how our 
 Revolution, started in 1787, has been a-going 
 it. Those who all along had been regarded as 
 governing their State, independently, as a dis- 
 tinct political people, by a subordinate instru- 
 mentality — legislative, executive, judicial — 
 have, as a portion of the sovereign-Nation 
 people in their commonwealth, really, if per- 
 haps unconsciously, or by a blind instinct of 
 nationality, been revolting, piece-meal-wise, 
 against their former selves, while apparently 
 exercising their old political power as State, in 
 proclaiming their several constitutions. This 
 is just what might be expected in a continuing 
 revolution, begun without any State's knowl- 
 edge, when they ratified themselves into in- 
 cipient nonentity, to be revealed in course of 
 a century as scientific nationality. 
 
126 The Centennial 
 
 Nobody need get disgruntled over this ap- 
 parent confusion, for we can find the great 
 balance-wheel for our constant Revolution pre- 
 pared for us a hundred years agone and fully 
 set a-going, improved and readjusted to its 
 office in the Reconstruction time, 1865-7. As 
 citizenship is, or is to be national, all the rights 
 and duties of a citizen are dependent on the 
 measure of justice given by the organ which 
 stands for the Nation. A new meaning is to 
 be given to, or a truer understanding has been 
 had of the guaranty of a " republican form of 
 government " to " every State in this Union," 
 declared in Article IV. 
 
 It used to be supposed that it was a pledge, 
 given by somebody, to each State, or political 
 people of each State in the Union, that it should 
 constitute an independent, self-governing body 
 in the Union. But when we once understand 
 that this State and this people of a State have 
 no real existence, that they are like legal 
 fictions for lawyers' use, we comprehend that 
 the beneficiaries of the guaranty are the sev- 
 eral portions of the Nation in geographical 
 districts, entitled to such an administration of 
 law for rights and duties, civil and political, as 
 
of a Rcvolutio)i. 127 
 
 may be called republicanism, which should be 
 as attainable in one commonwealth as in an- 
 other. 
 
 In view of this our venerable College shows 
 us how to modify our ancient reading of the 
 letter which killeth, by saying : — * 
 
 11 The requirement (art. 4. sec. 4) of the pres- 
 ent constitution that the " United States " 
 shall preserve republicanism (sic) in the State 
 governments, vests in Congress the power to 
 determine in what republican forms and institu- 
 tions consist, i.e., to prescribe the only legiti- 
 mate form of local government which the Na- 
 tion suffers to exist The Congress has 
 
 exercised the power in every enabling Act, and 
 in the reconstruction Acts of 1867." 
 
 So that, plainly, the " United States " will 
 execute this guaranty, not occasionally, or 
 according to isolated exigencies of political 
 tranquillity, as was done, it was supposed, in 
 the case of Rhode Island, but by means of a 
 general statute, will define republicanism as an 
 individual right, comprehending life, liberty, 
 and the pursuit of happiness, and provide for a 
 
 * P. S. Q. I., p. 22, note. 
 
128 The Cente?inial 
 
 due process of law by which it may be 
 defended in the National Courts. 
 
 Well, to know all this is to know much 
 worth knowing; or rather, since it is presented 
 by way of inducing scepticism, it should be to 
 doubt much that is worth doubting. But 
 seeing, as we do, that faith is the thing we 
 want just at present for our jubilee and cen- 
 tennial, we are bound to get at it straight-off, 
 somehow ; by scientific principles and reason- 
 ing on the nature of things in general, if that 
 may be done, or else by the bald assertion of 
 something for the existence of which, as fact, 
 not a shadow of evidence is produced and 
 which is contradicted by the records that have 
 never been disputed. 
 
 Perhaps those who have thus compelled our 
 recognition of the continuing Revolution 
 might have been less candid if they had been 
 invited to celebrate with us on that last 17th 
 of September. It should seem a singular way 
 for us to do it by telling the world how com- 
 pletely the appearance of the thing born one 
 hundred years before had belied its reality. 
 But we have got to face the music in our own 
 day ; even though all those who preceded us 
 
of a Revolution. 129 
 
 should have lived in a dream. Let those 
 doubt who may like it. We shall leave our 
 learned teachers and those who may be con- 
 tent with doubting, after their fashion, to bite 
 their nails over this sceptical or negative side 
 of this great subject, while we attend to the 
 affirmative ; accepting from them, as the his- 
 torical basis of faith and hope, the legend, 
 now well grown, of the Nation's Revolution 
 in our once revered Adoption, proclaiming 
 what we believe our supreme Government to 
 be, in respect to us, and what we are in re- 
 spect to our supreme Government. 
 
 What then is the first duty of any sovereign 
 government? Is it not laid down or assumed 
 by publicists, as a fundamental axiom, that the 
 first duty of such a government is to itself ; 
 the obligation to defend its own existence ? 
 And is not such obligation also its right ? a 
 right correlative to duty on the part of others? 
 others whose duty is submission — its own sub- 
 jects? Is it not the right of dominion, recog- 
 nized by the world without, because exercised 
 over the world within ? 
 
 This right or self-directed duty is para- 
 mount. To suppose that there is some law, 
 9 
 
 S 
 
ijO The Centennial 
 
 whether called a constitution or not, to restrain 
 it is to contradict the assumption that it is a 
 sovereign government ; for such a law pre- 
 supposes a law-giver distinct from and indepen- 
 dent of such government. 
 
 When the existence of this isolated primary 
 right is once established, all those inconsisten- 
 cies or malformations which we are now taught 
 to regard as relics of the usurpation period — 
 usurpation of what used to be called " State 
 Sovereignty" — become of minor importance. 
 For, whatever support they may have claimed 
 from blind precedent, they will now, with our 
 new insight, be always construed as only sec- 
 ondary, or even ancillary, in relation to this 
 primary or paramount right. The States will 
 then appear as subjects under law, while the 
 Nation — in its only come-at-able representa- 
 tive the Central Government — is above law. 
 This being understood, the written constitu- 
 tion may, at times, be disregarded for the pres- 
 ervation of this government ; as was declared 
 by many patriotic statesmen it could, should, 
 and was, in the civil war and in reconstruction, 
 though there is no need of putting it so rough\ 
 Another teacher, a Professor also in another 
 
of a Revolution. 1 3 1 
 
 University, who has also recently presented 
 this discovery of the Revolutionary adoption 
 says* — " Moreover, this boundary between 
 federal and state powers should not be un- 
 changing. As the conditions of national life 
 change, it becomes necessary that the federal 
 government should assume jurisdiction over 
 subjects which in simpler conditions are left to 
 the states. With a written constitution, 
 which cannot be easily amended, it is inevita- 
 ble that this transference of power should be 
 made by interpretation. But by whatever 
 process* the change is wrought, whether by in- 
 terpretation or constitutional amendment, the 
 competence of the State is narrowed even 
 against its will by the action of the federal 
 state." 
 
 This was plain enough in Reconstruction, 
 when the competency of eleven States, if 
 States they were, in ratifying amendments was 
 narrowed against their wills. 
 
 We have learned from our own College 
 
 * Professor Richard Hudson, University of Michigan : in 
 the New Eiiglandcr and Yale Review. January, iSSS. Art. 
 State Autonomy vs State Sovereignty, p. 42. 
 
132 The Centennial 
 
 friends that " the People is a national concep- 
 tion and preserves its integrity against govern- 
 ment only as a Nation." They say further : — 
 
 " Blot out the national government and you 
 still have the Nation physically and ethnically, 
 which, by its own innate power, will restore 
 its political organization ; but blot out the 
 government of the commonwealth and you 
 have a territory measured by the chain of the 
 surveyor, with a population governed exclu- 
 sively by the Nation's organs and restored to 
 local self-government only by the Nation's 
 act." * 
 
 We might ask — Who is the somebody who 
 can do the blotting out in these cases ? Charles 
 Sumner's State-suicide theory implied that 
 eleven States had blotted themselves out, as 
 political fact. Our professors give this state- 
 ment of theirs as an old doctrine of consti- 
 tutional law by adding : — 
 
 " This is really, though probably not con- 
 sciously, what every judge means when he 
 says 'To the Government of the United 
 States that which has not been granted is 
 
 *S. P. Q, I., p. 25. 
 
of a Revolution. 133 
 
 denied ; but to the government of the states 
 that which has not been denied is granted.' ' 
 
 When we recall how constantly this proposi- 
 tion has been repeated by the highest officials, 
 from the day when the government was first 
 inaugurated, we see in what a topsy-turvy rev- 
 olutionary chaos the whole thing has been ; 
 so much so that the best trained minds have 
 been misunderstanding themselves and mis- 
 constructing their own words for a whole cent- 
 ury. 
 
 It is by understanding the true position of 
 this sovereign Government that we shall begin 
 to understand how, in the continued revolu- 
 tion, we as a people have had our political ex- 
 istence changed for us ; if we assume that the 
 14th and 15th Amendments mean something, 
 or that " national citizenship " has come into 
 being as never before. What sort of citizens 
 were we before? Are we now individually, in 
 the eyes of foreign powers anything more or 
 less than before? If they had before recog- 
 nized us, when within their jurisdictions, as 
 citizens only as being the subjects of some other 
 recognized sovereignty, has our citizenship 
 changed in their eyes by some change in their 
 
134 The Centennial 
 
 recognition of the sovereignty ; as might occur 
 in the case of a conquest? If not, then, if our 
 citizenship has changed at all, it must have 
 been by change of some internal relation, not 
 noticed by foreign powers. 
 
 If citizenship is to mean some conscious 
 possession of political power, as legal right, has 
 that possession been expanded or has it been 
 limited ? Does a national citizenship, in this 
 sense, exist at all, and what is it, anyhow ? 
 What is any man's political liberty now, as an 
 individual right? 
 
 Understanding citizen as one of a number of 
 voters known as constituting a political unit, 
 determining its own existence by discriminat- 
 ing the possession of the franchise, as a legal 
 right — citizenship indicates a conscious pos- 
 session of political right, or power — depend- 
 ent only on the unit's voluntary continuance 
 in union with other such units. While the 
 national Government had, as administrative 
 organ, a recognized come-at-able superior in 
 the political people, existing as States volun- 
 tarily united, there was a national citizenship 
 as a political capacity distinct from national 
 civil citizenship or mere subjection. 
 
of a Revolution. 135 
 
 But, the Central Government being re- 
 garded as a sovereign Government in its own 
 right, with no recognized superior but a geo- 
 graphical ethnical nation, as discernible by 
 professors of political science and the nature 
 of things, there is no national citizenship as a 
 political capacity. There are no citizens of 
 the nation, except as there are subjects of the 
 Central or Imperial Government. 
 
 No man here had been subject of some one 
 State. The inhabitant was always the sub- 
 ject of States — being in union, thirteen first, 
 more afterwards ; a political fact known to the 
 world. Because sovereignty, the opposite of 
 subjection, was held by States only as union. 
 Subjection always has been national. If there 
 has been a change, subjection is now claimable 
 only by the President, Congress, and Judiciary 
 for the time being. 
 
 The only possible continuation for citizen- 
 ship, as right not dependent on the Central 
 Government, was by the continued existence 
 of some States, not dependent on that Gov- 
 ernment, but on their own mutual recognition 
 as continuing in the voluntary political union. 
 Citizenship, under this condition, was derived 
 
136 The Centennial 
 
 from a definite sovereign, distinct from all 
 agents of government. When State existence 
 and citizenship in the State may depend on 
 the Central Government, national citizenship, 
 as legal right, would not depend on the will of 
 any people or Nation ; or, only as there is 
 always a possibility of revolution, by the force 
 of a majority or minority. 
 
 Thus we ourselves continue the century of 
 a revolution, by affirming, openly now, that 
 sovereignty of the Nation and revolution are 
 identical. This was Tom Jefferson's doctrine ; 
 as it has been French practice since the revo- 
 lution which he witnessed. 
 
 But this Government, you may say, is, after 
 all, only an elective government. As it is 
 periodically renewable and renewed by elec- 
 tion, it cannot be called a personal govern- 
 ment. It would be impossible for those in 
 office, at any time, to continue themselves as 
 officers of government by continuing to use 
 the powers exercised before ; or to govern, as a 
 monarchy or an oligarchy does, by simple con- 
 tinuation in a preconceived line of succession. 
 How can this Government, while its personnel 
 is elected, continue itself as against the States 
 
of a Revolution. 137 
 
 or against anybody else ; as monarchs or oli- 
 garchs may have done as against the mass of 
 the nation ; even if it should have that control 
 over the electoral bodies which has been in- 
 dicated by sceptical criticism as essential in 
 the prospective development of the revolu- 
 tionary adoption ? 
 
 Well then, how do monarchs and oligarchs 
 manage to do it ? No one thinks of the most 
 absolute potentate as possessing, literally, 
 that is in his own brawn and muscle, the 
 power which he directs ; seemingly of his own 
 will. A single human being, a Caesar or a 
 Charlemagne, a Bourbon, or a Bonaparte, holds 
 sway only because some indefinite number of 
 persons, a minority, usually, in proportion to 
 all under his rule, believe that his possession 
 of political power is, more or less certainly, 
 for their own personal benefit. There is a 
 continuing collection of partisans of some sort 
 which makes the possibility of any absolute 
 ruler. 
 
 The same holds for elective governments. 
 While their personnel must experience change 
 by periodical dissolution and reintegration, a 
 distinct body of electors will continue by natu- 
 
138 The Centennial 
 
 ral substitution. The theory of all elective 
 systems involves personal preferences of some 
 sort, for candidates, aside from party divisions. 
 But all political history indicates Parties as 
 inevitable under all forms of popular govern- 
 ment. No one sees parties distinguished solely 
 by personal preferences or mere favor or dis- 
 favor for measures, as expedient or otherwise. 
 We see in all trans-Atlantic states parties 
 antagonized by different faiths as to the loca- 
 tion of that supreme power which all profess 
 to recognize when this location is ascertained, 
 and it is easy to conceive how, in republics, a 
 party may arise which claims the possession 
 of power as its right ; a right which it is its 
 first duty to defend. 
 
 The generations which have preceded our 
 own in the century past were nursed in the 
 belief that the republics of the future would 
 never know a party rivalship based on such a 
 claim ; and this was because they supposed 
 that, here, a paper constitution would hold the 
 place of crown and sceptre — in the name of 
 a sovereign people. Whether anything has 
 happened since J. Q. Adams' Jubilee oration 
 to make this questionable, or has not, we can 
 
of a Revolution, 139 
 
 see by the broader glare of our hundred-year- 
 old revolution that, here, a party must take 
 the place of that class of persons, which, in so- 
 called autocratic countries, sustains the mon- 
 arch or oligarchy, and that it will itself become 
 our sovereign and master. 
 
 If among all parties there is one only which 
 affirms the sovereignty of the Central Govern- 
 ment — as founded on our legend of the cent- 
 ury-old revolution-Government, born in the 
 adoption of the constitution in 1787— that is 
 the party which should alone subsist, which 
 alone can claim allegiance. As such it may 
 continue, like a dynasty, and, as such, its duty 
 to itself and its right against others is to main- 
 tain itself for the support of that Government 
 as sovereign. 
 
 While the revolution of 1787 was unrecog- 
 nized, the States seemed continuing organiza- 
 tions ; entities visibly holding, in union only 
 and not severally, all sovereign powers ; that 
 is, both those exercised by their central organ 
 and those exercised by their several organs of 
 local government. When they may have 
 been confined to administrative or police func- 
 tions merely, under the Central Government, 
 
1 40 The Centennial 
 
 or have become geographical groups of com- 
 munes, under a national statute guaranteeing 
 "republicanism," according to the French 
 ideal of political liberty in the despotism of a 
 sovereign people, it will be inevitable that the 
 party controlling that Central Government 
 will have become the actual sovereign. 
 
 We may say : Parties have always existed 
 here. It is necessary to the elective system 
 that administration should be in the hands of 
 the strongest party and yet no party here has 
 had exclusive possession of administration. 
 True ; and it is to be remembered that hith- 
 erto, this power could not be entirely in the 
 hands of one organ, or of a number of organs 
 acting subordinately to some one central 
 superior. But this has been owing entirely to 
 the prolonged existence of those " relics of 
 usurpation" — the States — lingering stumbling- 
 blocks in the path of the Revolution begun by 
 adoption. It is to be supposed that the party 
 having the preponderance in the Central Gov- 
 ernment would also be the stronger in the 
 States having the larger part of the popula- 
 tion. But, hitherto, no one of the several 
 parties which have existed has, at any time, 
 
of a Revolution. 141 
 
 had majority-control of the Central and also 
 of every State Government ; and, for this 
 reason, the entire exclusion of minorities from 
 the personnel of the Central Government has 
 been impossible. 
 
 When the faith, which is to follow aroused 
 "scepticism in politics," shall have had its 
 perfect work and a party shall be found whose 
 first principle is that the Central Government 
 has, at last, in our continuing Revolution, 
 become the only representative of sovereignty, 
 it will be inevitable that such party should 
 claim the right to determine the personnel 
 of that Government against all and every 
 other whose belief may conflict with its own 
 political faith. Its duty towards such gov- 
 ernment will be its right to maintain itself 
 in possession as against such others ; a right 
 to maintain the government as its own instru- 
 ment or organ ; without regard to its being in 
 minority or majority ; because all who may 
 not equally attribute sovereignty to that gov- 
 ernment will be in the position, essentially, of 
 rebels and traitors. Even if some such other 
 party should, by numbers and the vulgar pre- 
 possession for constitutional formalities, ac- 
 
142 The Centennial 
 
 quire a preponderance, its occupation of the 
 Central Government should be regarded as 
 only a temporary interregnum — a passing re- 
 action of the forces mingling in the revolu- 
 tionary tide. It may sometimes be good 
 policy in such periods not to press the claim 
 of party legitimacy too far or too fast. There 
 may be cases — perhaps there was an example 
 when Tilden was not inaugurated — when visit- 
 ing statesmen can manoeuvre to prevent a 
 party's lapse from power. In other cases of 
 close election, such ingenuity may have been 
 equally desirable, but not so prudently at- 
 tempted. 
 
 But we shall not falter in our faith in this 
 Revolution and its onward movements. We 
 have learned from our College what is the 
 approaching fate of those " three things " 
 which stand in the way of " complete relega- 
 tion " of the States to their subordinate posi- 
 tion in respect to " the Nation's organs of 
 central government." 
 
 " They are all relics of the usurpation of 
 1 78 1. Whatever show of reason existed for 
 any of them has largely passed away, and is 
 now on the point of totally disappearing ; and 
 
ft 
 
 of a Revolution. 143 
 
 when the people come clearly to see that this 
 intermeddling with the politics of the Nation 
 is what prevents the commonwealths from 
 properly discharging their proper functions in 
 jural and police administration, the spirit will 
 hardly be lacking to proceed to the transfor- 
 mation. For ten years now we have been 
 passing through a period of reaction against 
 the pronounced nationalism of the previous 
 fifteen ; but we shall come to the end of it, 
 and the precedents are not wanting in our 
 history to point the way for the still further 
 nationalization of our political institutions."* 
 
 We listened a while ago, to the suggestion 
 from a prominent weekly as to the recogni- 
 tion which constitutional changes in 1865-7 
 should have received at our centennial cele- 
 bration last September. This suggestion 
 seemed to show a glimmering appreciation of 
 our revolutionary progression. Yet this same 
 serene hebdomadal has remarked, a propos of 
 some recent decisions of the Supreme Court. — 
 
 " It was ignorantly taken for granted that a 
 Republican Supreme Court had all these 
 
 * p. s. Q., I., 24, 25 
 
i44 The Centennial 
 
 years been interpreting the Constitution in a 
 way that favored the latitudinarian views of 
 those politicians who for partisan ends have 
 sought to aggrandize the powers of the 
 Federal Government."* 
 
 Well, it would not be very strange if some 
 of us should lean to latitudinarianism after a 
 century of Revolution. " Partisan ends ! " 
 Shall colleges and professors of political 
 science and irresistible idea be shunted off 
 with the lobby and rings and hunters of 
 boodle in the communes? " Ignorantly taken 
 for granted " — Is this recognition for historical 
 discovery and ethnical prognostication ? 
 
 The editorial proceeds to proof by calling 
 up Mr. Justice Miller as having — 
 
 " In his notable address upon the Supreme 
 Court before the alumni of Michigan Univer- 
 sity, last summer, summed up the case, when 
 he said : ' It may be considered now as set- 
 tled that, with the exception of these specific 
 provisions in them [the Amendments] for the 
 protection of the personal rights of the citi- 
 zens and people of the United States, and the 
 
 * The Nation ; Dec. 8, 1887, article, State Rights. 
 
of a Revolution. 145 
 
 necessary restrictions upon the powers of the 
 States for that purpose, with the additions to 
 the power of the General Government to en- 
 force those provisions, no substantial change 
 has been made. The necessity of the great 
 powers conceded by the constitution origi- 
 nally to the Federal Government and the 
 equal necessity of the autonomy of the States 
 and their power to regulate their domestic 
 affairs remain as the great features of our com- 
 plex form of government/ " 
 
 Just so. The Supreme Court says that it 
 considers just this sort of thing quite proper, 
 just at present, or quite necessary. But sup- 
 pose the court feels differently, some day. 
 There is no recognition here of the States as 
 having an iota of power by right above law : 
 and the whole question is of that sort of right ; 
 which is one that no court of law can deter- 
 mine. 
 
 " Complex form of government " — so it may 
 seem to those who cannot accommodate their 
 consciences to the revolution legend — the rev- 
 olution of centennial adoption. Their opinions 
 on the matter of our political obligations are 
 far more obfuscated than were those of the 
 10 
 
146 The Centennial 
 
 foreigners who charged the Northern States 
 with being false to their own axioms, in not 
 acquiescing in Southern Secession. They, the 
 foreigners, could see that a genesis by legality 
 for a political constitution is not possible. 
 Force, revolutionary or otherwise, must be 
 found to support it. Our own Quarterly 
 says * in another article by the same writer : — 
 " It seems to me, then, that an exact political 
 science would lead us to abandon any attempt 
 to find a legal justification for the manner in 
 which the constitution of 1787 was established. 
 We should accept fairly and fully the proposi- 
 tion that the constitution of 1787 rested origi- 
 nally upon a revolutionary basis, and justify 
 the fact upon the principle of public neces- 
 sity." 
 
 And that is as near the true statement as 
 any one can give it : except that revolutions 
 are a class of facts that require no justification- 
 certificate from anybody, or from any science 
 or system of any kind. When a man begins 
 to talk of a revolution's having been necessary, 
 good, desirable, or " such as political science 
 
 P. S. Q., I., p. 619, article on Von Hoist's " Public Law." 
 
of a Revolution. 147 
 
 would indicate "* as establishing that there 
 was or was not a revolution, he stultifies 
 himself by assuming to judge of the exist- 
 ence of that which he has already asserted 
 as existing. The same sort of thing is done 
 in saying that the thirteen States, were indi- 
 vidually sovereign before 17%7—by usurpation. 
 A revolution is a fact by its nature ; as dis- 
 tinct from legislation. But both are conse- 
 quences of some human will. To say, in 
 affirming a political change following civil 
 war, that " war legislates," marks the vaporous 
 idealist. Fact, not doctrine, nor idea, is the 
 foundation of all political existence. So, if 
 before the adoption the thirteen States were 
 thirteen separately sovereign nations, it was so 
 by virtue of the fact that so it was. Or, if 
 thirteen States or less than thirteen did, at 
 the time of this adoption, or if more than thir- 
 teen did, during the civil war, possess, to- 
 gether, and not severally, the powers of an 
 independent nation, such was the fact — with- 
 out constitution for it, or law for it, or contract 
 under law for it, or reason for it, or political 
 
 t P. s. Q., I., p. 620. 
 
148 The Centennial 
 
 science for it, or consent of anybody but them- 
 selves, as States existing in political union, for 
 it. But lawyers and judges, as is their nature, 
 will fancy, with Mr. Justice Miller, that they 
 can find law for the existence of the law-giver. 
 
 Revolutions have been likened to volcanic 
 eruptions. On Vesuvius they have what they 
 call an observatory : not to watch stars, but 
 the volcano : to note the glowing crater, the 
 rumblings, the brimstone vapor and, above all, 
 the shakings of the mountain. For this they 
 have what they call a seismograph — earth- 
 quake-recorder. Our Supreme Court at the 
 Capitol, seated between the Senate Chamber 
 and Hall of Representatives, may be like a 
 seismograph between two craters of a volcano 
 always more or less eruptive. It can record 
 the earthquake and perhaps give warning of 
 the lava-flow. If it will be part of a revolu- 
 tionary sovereign government, it must be 
 more than a court of law in the true sense 
 of that word, and may learn in time that there 
 is no law to give or withhold sovereignty. 
 
 What does Senator Hawley know about 
 adoption when he assumes to say that " the 
 tendency towards consolidation of the entire 
 
of a Revolution. 149 
 
 powers of the government is one of the strong- 
 est to-day and one of those most dangerous to 
 the republican experiment as our fathers un- 
 derstood it?" The fact being, however, that 
 we, a hundred years later, understand our fa- 
 thers' understanding a great deal better than 
 they understood it themselves. 
 
 We who know that our citizenship has be- 
 come subjection, and who know it because we 
 know where to find our sovereign, are clear on 
 this point of our obligations. We who recog- 
 nize the revolutionary basis of the supreme 
 Central Government shall of necessity present 
 ourselves, collectively, as the Legitimist Party, 
 to which, individually, we shall give our alle- 
 giance, independently of men or measures. If 
 any ask how our party can be recognized and 
 distinguished from others, when perhaps we 
 may not, as a party, have complete control of 
 all government, central as well as local, we 
 shall claim identification, historically, with 
 those whose fortune it was to have principally 
 directed the Government during the civil war 
 and the Reconstruction era : assuming, from 
 the arguments of the leaders, at that time, 
 that they did this on the principle of devotion 
 
i5° 
 
 The Centennial 
 
 to a supreme or sovereign government, then 
 recognized by them as superior to all States 
 North or South, united or disunited, and 
 therein making the position of that govern- 
 ment, during the war, intelligible and politi- 
 cally consistent : — intelligible and consistent 
 in itself, but especially as compared with its 
 position under any other explanation of our 
 political institutions which had ever been set 
 up by any other party proposing to support 
 the government in that crisis, while still ad- 
 hering to the historical doctrine, or assump- 
 tion, of an originally separate sovereignty in 
 the several States. 
 
 This party it is which, from its record in 
 that crisis and with the new discovery of its 
 basis in old revolution, can claim the titles of 
 The Great and Historical Party, as compared 
 with others, old or new, and which now takes 
 its stand as Legitimist, by the right of the 
 Central Government to claim personal allegi- 
 ance, as being a personal government, now 
 seen to have rested one hundred years — not 
 on social compact, federal compact or any 
 such fiction of fetish-constitution-mongers, but 
 on fact, historical fact — the Revolution in the 
 
of a Revolution. 1 5 1 
 
 adoption of the written Constitution of 1787. 
 Here then, at last, Americans can find a 
 party with a principle which is perennial — a 
 principle which can be distinguished from fol- 
 lowing men or pursuing measures; a princi- 
 ple which is loyalty — not to a form of words, a 
 statute, a paper constitution, nor to a form of 
 government — but loyalty to persons, that is, 
 to the party itself. For we see that, in order 
 to recognize in the Central Government a per- 
 sonal sovereign, and to support it as such, the 
 party must affirm its own personal right to 
 create that government. In the nature of 
 such a party this loyalty is its only principle, 
 in the true sense of the word. To this, meas- 
 ures are means, not ends. By this, men's 
 qualifications and characters as candidates for 
 office are to be estimated ; or rather, we 
 should say, their qualifications and characters 
 need not be estimated at all. To be the can- 
 didate of the party is character and qualifica- 
 tion. 
 
 So, in behalf of such a party, it could well 
 be said by an orator : — " The general judgment 
 of the American people is that you must vote 
 for your principles, and for those who agree 
 
152 The Centennial 
 
 with you in principle"; and by an organ of its 
 policy: — "Any citizen, even the most intelli- 
 gent, may be deceived in regard to the charac- 
 ter of a candidate. Just as the shrewdest 
 business men are constantly suffering from 
 misplaced confidence in adroit scamps, so that 
 the plausible demagogue finds a new crop of 
 deluded victims every season. But the plain 
 citizen need never be deceived if he inquire 
 honestly regarding the beliefs and tendencies 
 of a great historical party. He can know 
 with absolute certainty in what directions its 
 power will be exerted." 
 
 And right you are, this time, dear old Tri- 
 bune ! While the beautifulest of it all is that 
 other contestants for power fancy that they 
 can get on without any such faith in them- 
 selves as sovereign — that is, without claiming 
 loyalty for themselves, as party having a di- 
 vine right to rule — because they have never 
 been able to find a personal sovereign any- 
 where. 
 
 Such other possible parties are obliged to 
 profess that the only issues in practical politics 
 are as to measures of administration ; or, that 
 such measures are to be judged by considera- 
 
of a Revolution* 153 
 
 tions of utility and legal constitutionality ; 
 without reference to knowledge of any intrin- 
 sic relation of superiority and inferiority held 
 by the Central Government and the States 
 reciprocally. So it has always been with 
 them. And, therefore, these other parties 
 never could give an explanation, when they 
 affirmed the duty of the citizen to support the 
 Central Government in a crisis like that of 
 1 86 1 — 5 ; that is, none comparable for logical 
 consistency with that which we now base on 
 the discovery of actual revolution in the adop- 
 tion of 1787 ; whereby that sovereignty came 
 to an end, which all parties used to assume 
 had belonged to each State of the thirteen, in 
 severalty. 
 
 From their failure to recognize this revolu- 
 tion, these other parties have been forced, at 
 all times since the adoption, to appear as sup- 
 porters of that doctrine of State-sovereignty 
 which all the outside world regarded as prov- 
 ing that the adoption was no more than an act 
 of confederation between sovereigns ; and as 
 justifying the claims of the Southern Confed- 
 eracy to international recognition on their 
 secession ; and which would of itself have se- 
 
1 54 The Centennial 
 
 cured that recognition, if there had been no 
 question of moral sympathy or repugnance 
 with slavery ; and which, as it is, has made the 
 Northern charge of treason on the part of the 
 Confederacy, or its citizens, seem to all the 
 world an absurdity. 
 
 In this imbecility of every other party lies 
 the present strength of our grand old party of 
 historic legitimacy, begun in Revolution. For 
 even when not holding such thorough control 
 of the Central Government as it had from i860 
 to a recent period, the party can secure sup- 
 port from the forces of its purblind adversa- 
 ries for measures which it would naturally pro- 
 mote in supporting its own views of centrali- 
 zation, and which, therefore, must facilitate its 
 own return to power, and secure its possession 
 in the future. 
 
 The dullest can see that, as precedent to 
 be used in some later affirmation of our 
 own Legitimist position, when the time comes, 
 it is as useful, or even better, that another 
 party, having temporary preponderance in the 
 Central Government, should, for its own parti- 
 san ends, have interfered in State elections 
 and blindly deserted its own traditions. Be- 
 
of a Revolution. 
 
 DS 
 
 sides, as long as any other parties, not accept- 
 ing our legitimist doctrine, are possible, it will 
 be politically expedient for us to endure the 
 customary survival of those " relics of usurpa- 
 tion " — the States ; being careful, however, to 
 ignore any pretension to their individual or 
 collective possession of original power and to 
 avoid any language warranting an inference 
 that they had held reserved powers, or that the 
 powers which have been or may be exercised 
 by the Central Government had ever been 
 granted or delegated to it as agent, instead of 
 having been assumed, among the whole sum 
 of sovereign powers, by right above law, be- 
 cause founded on Revolution. Thus, once on 
 a time, in years before its days of grandeur, 
 our great historical party in convention in i860, 
 could say — 
 
 "Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate 
 of the rights of the States, and especially the 
 right of each State to order and control its 
 own domestic institutions according to its own 
 judgment, exclusively, is essential to that bal- 
 ance of power on which the perfection and en- 
 durance of our political fabric depends." 
 
 What was there in this to limit future 
 
156 The Centennial 
 
 action ? This being, at the most, the party's 
 approval of whatever it might at any time 
 deem " essential " to the perfection and endur- 
 ance of our political fabric. There was here 
 no recognition of political rights in the sense 
 of political powers. When the day of party- 
 power came, the essence of our political fabric 
 was found to lie all in the existence of a Cen- 
 tral Government, alone representing the sum 
 and substance of all independent political 
 dominion. 
 
 All this goody-goody talk can be repeated 
 at any time. It is much like the Supreme 
 Court's informing* us that " under the pres- 
 sure of all the excited feeling growing out of 
 the war, our statesmen have still believed that 
 the existence of the States with powers for 
 domestic and local government .... was es- 
 sential to the perfect working of our complex 
 form of government, though they [our states- 
 men — mind you !] have thought proper to im- 
 pose additional limitations upon the States, 
 and to confer additional powers on that of the 
 
 * Quoted in Mr. Justice Miller's Michigan University Ad- 
 dress from the opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases. 
 
of a Revolution. 157 
 
 United States. But whatever fluctuations 
 may be seen in the history of public opinion 
 on this subject, during the period of our na- 
 tional existence, we think it will be found 
 that this court, so far as its functions required, 
 has always held with a steady and an even 
 hand the balance between State and Federal 
 power, and we trust that such may continue to 
 be the history of its relation to that subject 
 so long as it shall have duties to perform 
 which demand of it a construction of the con- 
 stitution, or of any of its parts." 
 
 If the court, or " our statesmen," or any- 
 body else, has engaged to consider always the 
 best interests of the States and allow them as 
 much self-government as is for the good 
 of people in general — everybody is greatly 
 obliged to them for their benevolent designs. 
 But when we once have comprehended that 
 this subjection of ours rests on a Revolution be- 
 gun a century ago by " the natural leaders of 
 the Nation," though hardly yet perfected, 
 even by "the men of 1861-7," or "our states- 
 men," as the court puts it, who improved on 
 the work of the men of 1787, we know where 
 we are and can accept the situation. 
 
158 The Centennial 
 
 With this conception of loyalty we may 
 always promote any single measures, by whom- 
 soever proposed, which make our States or 
 "commonwealths" recipients of the Central 
 Government's indulgence or assistance : just 
 as provinces, cities or communes are proper 
 subjects of favorable or unfavorable attentions 
 under more fully centralized sovereignties. 
 Surplus revenue can be distributed here and 
 there, like candy to children at Christmas — 
 to keep them or make them good. Works of 
 internal improvement will suggest themselves, 
 as convenient in making just discrimination 
 among localities ; or bounties to make the in- 
 dustries of some districts appear profitable. 
 
 And in this connection, we shall all see the 
 extreme propriety in providing the Govern- 
 ment with an overflowing treasury ; far above 
 the insignificant savings from an income which 
 the revolutionary adopters of a century ago 
 imagined sufficient for a government " to pro- 
 vide for the common defence, promote the 
 general welfare and secure the blessings of 
 liberty." In fact, a continuing war-revenue- 
 standard should be enthusiastically advocated ; 
 in view of the fact that our Legitimist party 
 
of a Revolution. 159 
 
 has always boasted that, with its support, the 
 Central Government had, as sovereign, main- 
 tained itself by war ; and we may naturally 
 expect to use methods equally costly in dol- 
 lars, if not in lives, to sustain its existence in 
 the future. 
 
 It is clear too that it will be conducive to 
 the same ends to favor, incidentally, the activi- 
 ties of persons who, being directly enriched 
 by receiving, as a class, protection through the 
 operation of an indirectly raised revenue, will 
 continue to look for it to the Central Govern- 
 ment ; and who, having benefited by this 
 means at the expense of other subjects of that 
 Government, may be expected to aid in sus- 
 taining by their wealth the Legitimist princi- 
 ple of loyalty, since such protection could 
 never be afforded by any of the local govern- 
 ments ; however willing they might be, to 
 say nothing of those States whose resources 
 might be impaired by such methods of promot- 
 ing the general welfare. 
 
 Similar considerations will indicate that for 
 some time to come a passive policy, in 
 some directions, may also be advantageous, 
 whether our actual party-preponderance be 
 
160 The Centennial 
 
 immediate or only prospective. Some politi- 
 cal experiments which would appear eminently 
 proper in view of identifying the Central Gov- 
 ernment with the entire People, as sovereign, 
 may well^be kept in abeyance. For example, 
 the anomaly in the existence of five adjoining 
 States in the eastern portion, together not 
 equal in territory to one of several others, 
 with their disproportionate representation in 
 the Senate, may remain unnoticed, as long as 
 the industries of their inhabitants would 
 marshal them among the supporters of our 
 party of Legitimacy and swell majorities to 
 sustain the financial methods it advocates. 
 
 Besides, are we not in honor bound to re- 
 spect localities whose intellectual activity has 
 so manipulated the biographies of our fore- 
 fathers as to disclose the historical foundation 
 of our sovereign Central Government ? It is 
 mainly due to the literary activity of our Doc- 
 trinaircSy in this little group of States and in 
 their Western affiliations, that we, as a party, 
 have learned how to assert our Legitimist 
 position — sovereign by the Grace of God, by 
 the necessity of things, by Revolution. Who 
 else can pretend to retain a disproportion of 
 
of a Revolution. 161 
 
 political power in State existence, if not those 
 who, by heredity, can claim that their concep- 
 tion of right and wrong must be received as 
 law by every one else ? 
 
 In such recognition of intellectual pre-emi- 
 nence in a small portion of our wide dominion, 
 we may also show our appreciation of all the 
 men of learning who are now crowding along 
 from East and West to aid our College in up- 
 holding the dynastic idea founded on the dis- 
 covered Revolution. All ordinary party strat- 
 egy is indeed nothing comparable to our mak- 
 ing friends with the literary fellows — genus 
 irritabile though they be. 
 
 It has been the folly and weakness of other 
 parties that they have taken small account of 
 " culture " and never understood what a few 
 despised scribblers have often done in shaping 
 the world's destiny. Their simple state-craft 
 mocks at nationalism — cooked up by study of 
 physical geography and ethnical affinities, and 
 at discrimination of sovereign peoples by lin- 
 guistic traditions beginning with the tower of 
 Babel. As to history, they are ready enough 
 to say — ''Let the dead past bury its dead," 
 but never seeing that there is no reality in the 
 ii 
 
1 62 The Centennial 
 
 things of the present except as they continue 
 the things of the past. The best they can do, 
 in the way of political dogma, is to repeat 
 with the Supreme Court the meaningless 
 apothegm — " an indestructible union of inde- 
 structible and immutable States " — to their 
 own confusion. 
 
 Let them ridicule our Professors for emulat- 
 ing French Doctrinaires, like Lamartine, in 
 political sentimentalism, and for preaching the 
 positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, as re- 
 ligion and law in one, and proclaiming at once 
 the war of ideas and the gospel of humanity. 
 Not having any such school of the prophets 
 to mould and polish their political vagaries 
 into a presentable form, their managers are 
 obliged to put their trust in slang-wanging 
 editorials, caucus, bar-room politicians, tough 
 boys, ballot-stuffings, jobs for the boodle and 
 in " tricks that are vain." 
 
 To those who know how the world is moved 
 by thought, Education is a word of power. 
 To us, who propose that the thought which 
 is to move others shall be of our own thinking, 
 Education is as a talisman in the hand of the 
 adept. It is the boast of modern Prussia that 
 
of a Revolution. 163 
 
 the school-master has done more than the re- 
 cruiting sergeant of great Fritz's time towards 
 giving her the hegemony of Germany. All 
 the older dynasties have learned that, with 
 education in their hands, they can well afford 
 to profess subjection to public opinion. 
 
 Educatio?i ! And what is Civil Service Re- 
 form, when regarded in relation to such a 
 party as ours, but a branch of education? For 
 this service a Central Government requires 
 educated men. Education is a grand thing ; 
 for is it not a grand thing to be educated ? 
 Educated, above all, in knowing who it is one 
 must obey, in the last resort, as sovereign. 
 The country needs above all, men who know 
 and can show this, and this can only be known 
 and shown by education — education in loyalty. 
 We are under deep obligations to isolated pro- 
 fessors \\\ so many colleges and universities for 
 these discoveries in our history which lay a 
 solid foundation for our supremacy. These 
 discoveries should be secured by means of one 
 grand national instrument of education. We 
 should profit by the examples of France and 
 Germany ; and have every school in the land 
 subordinated to a central university, main- 
 
164 The Centennial 
 
 tained from the superabundant means given 
 by an overflowing treasury in our hands. And 
 why should not we too have things orna- 
 mental, but also useful as exciting literary em- 
 ulation, like the Royal Society — F.R.S. gentle- 
 men ; Members of the Institilt, of the Academie 
 Franqaise^ etc., to gather about us a body of 
 decorated supporters of our Central Govern- 
 ment? 
 
 Indeed what a grand thing it would be to 
 have a government carried on throughout by 
 literary men — of the right sort, of course ! 
 Did not Lowell — one of our best known liter- 
 ary men — only the other day, quote before us, 
 Bacon, as " a man versed both in affairs and 
 books," for saying: "and, for the matter of 
 policy and government ; that learning should 
 rather hurt than enable thereunto is a thing 
 very improbable; " and, "It cannot but be a 
 matter of doubtful consequence if states be 
 managed by empiric statesmen, not well min- 
 gled with men grounded in learning. But, 
 contrariwise, it is, almost without instance 
 contradictory, that ever any Government was 
 disastrous that was in the hands of learned 
 governors." And it has been quite common 
 
of a Revolution. 165 
 
 of late years, in England and France, particu- 
 larly, to see eminence in literature regarded as 
 recommendation either for suffrages of the 
 voters or for appointment to office. But such 
 popular recognition of individual accomplish- 
 ments is not what we should encourage as 
 good example. Our idea of government by 
 literary men should be to have a properly edu- 
 cated class created, properly sifted by civil 
 service examinations — as to loyalty especially 
 — for material for our elections or appoint- 
 ments. This is not by any means an experi- 
 ment. We can point to one of the greatest, 
 the oldest, the most stable of all existing 
 empires for an illustration. 
 
 There's China — The Chinese Empire — you 
 know. Well : there they have had dynasty 
 after dynasty — whatever that may be ; the 
 present dynasty is number twenty and a good 
 deal more. But, practically, they have for 
 ages been governed by one set of men — their 
 literary fellows. With them, civil service ex- 
 aminations are as old and older than the Great 
 Wall. Examinations that last for weeks, that 
 are no joke. The young fellows have to study 
 Confucius ar t J Mencius ; old authors who 
 
1 66 The Centennial 
 
 wrote exclusively about virtue — public and pri- 
 vate virtue — and be posted on the piles of 
 commentators on these. Well : if the Chinese 
 officials are, as all travellers tell us, the most 
 venal, unrighteous, tyrannical set of bureau- 
 crats the world knows of ? Well : — why even 
 Bacon, Lord of Verulam and Viscount of St. 
 Albans, had his snarling detractors, who im- 
 peached him, as chancellor-judge, for taking 
 bribes. And they mocked at his learning and 
 called him names. For, as he said, " It hath 
 been ordinary with politique men to extenuate 
 and disable learned men by the name of 
 pedants " — doctrinaires, Lowell says, is the 
 word to-day. Well, but the educated Chinese 
 keep on having the offices and sustaining their 
 Central Government all the same. If educa- 
 tion and civil service examinations will do that 
 for those Chinese fellows, what may we not 
 expect when our Professors of Political 
 Science run the machine with books on public 
 virtue all beginning with the Revolution by 
 adoption ! If the Chinese Mandarins do the 
 way they do do, it must be because the way 
 they do is to do the way their ancestors did. 
 They worship the graves of their ancestors : 
 
of a Revolution. 167 
 
 annually and all the time. So that the practi- 
 cal application of Confucius on virtue is set- 
 tled by what has always been the application. 
 We, just about this time, are venerating the 
 monuments of our forefathers of a hundred 
 years ago, and we have learned something 
 about their virtue in the business of adoption. 
 Their example binds us to no stand-still pol- 
 icy. And, if they now appear not to have 
 known much what they were about, why 
 should we pretend to greater foresight. Rev- 
 olution was their choice. We too are adopt- 
 ers. Revolution should be ours, progressing 
 on high moral and intellectual ideas. 
 
 In the mean time men of any party, or of 
 no party, may in a certain sense sustain the 
 Central Government : in their obeying the 
 laws and constitution, voting for good persons 
 for Presidents and Congress, or in seeking 
 office and influence, as under some administra- 
 tion, on the strength of their personal antece- 
 dents. But there is no loyalty in all this. 
 Anybody is free to do this or to leave it 
 alone. It will be only those who support the 
 Central Government on the Legitimist basis 
 and as claiming sovereign rights for " the 
 
1 68 The Centennial 
 
 great historical party," who will be truly loyal 
 as men are loyal to monarchs in other lands. 
 As private subjects, we will show our loyalty 
 by simply voting for the candidates of this 
 party, regardless of their personal valuation. 
 To use the expression attributed to a Massa- 
 chusetts Senator of a past generation — " a 
 nomination, eminently unfit to be made, may 
 be eminently fit to be supported ; " and, to 
 borrow the unctuous phrase of a Massachu- 
 setts Senator of to-day. "A man cannot serve 
 God and Baal." When the question is of alle- 
 giance, the subject who proposes to be Inde- 
 pendent is a traitor. Those who, while pre- 
 tending to be still of us, refuse this test of 
 fidelity are apostates as well ; far more guilty 
 of treason than those who, never having been 
 shown the historic truth of a century-old Rev- 
 olution, may be seeking to find their sovereign 
 elsewhere, by rummaging among the records 
 of those " relics of usurpation," the States in 
 union. 
 
 In this way it will be that, as Garfield truly 
 said when in Congress, ideas will be the only 
 sovereigns ; with only one more question to 
 answer : — Whose ideas ? 
 
of a Revolution. 169 
 
 It must be an issue between men of different 
 ideas — not better distinguishable, perhaps, 
 than as "we 'uns " and "you 'uns," according 
 to the expressive nemenclature of the ruder 
 Southrons in the war. John Morley remarks 
 that " Rousseau's whole theory tends inevita- 
 bly to substitute a long series of struggles 
 after phrases and shadows, in the new era, for 
 the equally futile and equally bloody wars of 
 dynastic succession which have been the great 
 curse of the old. Men die for a phrase as 
 they used to die for a family." 
 
 Issues between ideas — sovereign ideas — 
 could be decided only as issues between sover- 
 eign flesh and bone are decided, — by "blood 
 and iron." 
 
 We who in our contests for place and power 
 every day proclaim the sovereignty of our 
 ideas as proved by the ordeal of battle, will 
 yet long display from our platforms and our 
 pulpits the garments rolled in the blood of 
 civil war : imitating from a distance of ages, 
 the chariot of the crimson-robed Imperator, 
 followed by cringing Senate and degenerated 
 people, exulting in the spectacle of a Roman 
 
170 The Centennial 
 
 Triumph for the subjugator of a despairing 
 Republic. 
 
 But ideas are of no one country. As sover- 
 eign, their sovereignty is cosmopolitan. So 
 we are more than a mere party existing in or 
 for one country or nation only — we who sup- 
 port the sovereignty of our own ideas. We 
 say with Auguste Comte, in concluding his 
 grand work on Positive Politics — 
 
 " In the name of the Past and the Future — 
 the servants of Humanity — both its philosoph- 
 ical and its practical servants — come forward 
 to claim as their due the general direction of 
 this world. Their object is to constitute at 
 length, a real Providence in all departments, 
 moral, intellectual and physical," etc., etc. 
 
 " The American people are not regardful 
 simply of their own sovereignty. They have 
 an outlook also beyond themselves and a suc- 
 cessful party with them, while national, must 
 be international as well. It must have large 
 human interests. * * * Our most conspicuous 
 national trait is the breadth of our human 
 sympathy. We recognize our relationship to 
 all the world * * * We do not even claim our 
 national privileges on the ground of our na- 
 
of a Revolution. 171 
 
 tional peculiarities * * * We claim ours, not 
 for the reason that we are Americans, but that 
 we are men. * * * This fact makes another 
 line of party success clear. * ' :: " * That party 
 with us is likely to be most successful in which 
 the unerring instinct of the people finds the 
 largest sense of our organic unity with all 
 mankind." So says Julius H. Seelye, Presi- 
 dent of another college.'* 
 
 By rushing onward in the battle of ideas we 
 place ourselves in solidarity with revolutionists 
 everywhere : with those who in Europe call 
 themselves the International — the Party of the 
 Revolution — Revolution anywhere and every- 
 where. We are of them : they are of us. We 
 are all " men without a country." Let them 
 corne along : the Communist, the Anarchist, 
 the Socialist, or whatever else ! We are all in 
 the swim ! Vogue la galere ! Let her go, Gal- 
 lagher! Vive la Commune!! 
 
 * Amherst, Mass., Article, "Our Political Prospects," in 
 The Forum, March 1888, p. 5. 
 
 
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