ople, when nineteen millions nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand
nine hundred and ninety-nine of them hold it, as well as himself? There
is no other doctrine of government here; and no man imputes to another,
and no man should claim for himself, any peculiar merit for asserting
what everybody knows to be true, and nobody denies. Why, where else can
we look but to the people for political power, in a popular government?
We have no hereditary executive, no hereditary branch of the
legislature, no inherited masses of property, no system of entails, no
long trusts, no long family settlements, no primogeniture. Every estate
in the country, from the richest to the poorest, is divided among sons
and daughters alike. Alienation is made as easy as possible; everywhere
the transmissibility of property is perfectly free. The whole system is
arranged so as to produce, as far as unequal industry and enterprise
render it possible, a universal equality among men; an equality of
rights absolutely, and an equality of condition, so far as the different
characters of individuals will allow such equality to be produced. He
who considers that there may be, is, or ever has been, since the
Declaration of Independence, any person who looks to any other source of
power in this country than the people, so as to give peculiar merit to
those who clamor loudest in its assertion, must be out of his mind, even
more than Don Quixote. His imagination was only perverted. He saw things
not as they were, though what he saw were things. He saw windmills, and
took them to be giants, knights on horseback. This was bad enough; but
whoever says, or speaks as if he thought, that anybody looks to any
other source of political power in this country than the people, must
have a stronger and wilder imagination, for he sees nothing but the
creations of his own fancy. He stares at phantoms.

Well, then, let all admit, what none deny, that the only source of
political power in this country is the people. Let us admit that they
are _sovereign_, for they are so; that is to say, the aggregate
community, the collected will of the people, is sovereign. I confess
that I think Chief Justice Jay spoke rather paradoxically than
philosophically, when he said that this country exhibited the
extraordinary spectacle of many sovereigns and no subjects. The people,
he said, are all sovereigns; and the peculiarity of the case is that
they have no subjects, except a few colored perso