d cruelty, for it
can govern only by terror. Such a government is unsuited to the nation.

This is seen in all history: in the attempt of the dictator Sulla to
preserve the old patrician government against the plebeian power that
time and events had developed in the Roman state, and which was about
to gain the supremacy, as we have seen, at Pharsalia, Philippi, and
Actium; in the efforts to establish a Jacobinical government in France
in 1793; in Rome in 1848, and the government of Victor Emmanuel in
Naples in 1860 and 1861. These efforts, proscriptions, confiscations,
military executions, assassinations, massacres, are all made in the
name of liberty, or in defence of a government supposed to guaranty the
well-being of the state and the rights of the people. They are
rendered inevitable by the mad attempt to force on a nation a
constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, or
repugnant to the national tastes, interests, habits, convictions, or
whole interior life. The repressive policy, adopted to a certain
extent by nearly all European governments, grows out of the madness of
a portion of the people of the several states in seeking to force upon
the nation an anti-national constitution. The sovereigns may not be
very wise, but they are wiser, more national, more patriotic than the
mad theorists who seek to revolutionize the state and establish a
government that has no hold in the national traditions, the national
character, or the national life; and the statesman, the patriot, the
true friend of liberty sympathizes with the national authorities, not
with the mad theorists and revolutionists.

The right of a nation to change its form of government, and its
magistrates or representatives, by whatever name called, is
incontestable. Hence the French constitution of 1789, which involved
that of 1793, was not illegal, for though accompanied by some
irregularities, it was adopted by the manifest will of the nation, and
consented to by all orders in the state. Not its legality but its
wisdom is to be questioned, together with the false and dangerous
theories of government which dictated it. There is no compact or mutual
stipulation between the state and the government. The state, under
God, is sovereign, and ordains and establishes the government, instead
of making a contract, a bargain, or covenant, with it. The common
democratic doctrine on this point is right, if by people is understood
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