ivate, and not a public right--a right
to govern the public, not a right to govern held from or by the public.

The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by violence,
by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right, and another may
usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact without acquiring any right
or legal title to it. The man who holds the legal title has the right
to oust him and re-enter upon his estate whenever able to do so. Here,
in the economical order, the fact and the right are distinguishable,
and the actual occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.
Holding sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very
properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments de
jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a prince
does not invalidate his title. But sovereignty, it has been shown, is
not in the government, but in the state, and the state is inseparable
from the public domain. The people organized and held by the domain or
national territory, are under God the sovereign nation, and remain so
as long as the nation subsists without subjection to another. The
government, as distinguished from the state or nation, has only a
delegated authority, governs only by a commission from the nation. The
revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes its
rights. The nation is always sovereign, and every organic people fixed
to the soil, and actually independent of every other, is a nation.
There can then be no independent nation de facto that is not an
independent nation de jure, nor de jure that is not de facto. The
moment a people cease to be an independent nation in fact, they cease
to be sovereign, and the moment they become in fact an independent
nation, they are so of right. Hence in the political order the fact and
the right are born and expire together; and when it is proved that a
people, are in fact an independent nation, there is no question to be
asked as to their right to be such nation.

In the case of the United States there is only the question of fact.
If they are in fact one people they are so in right, whatever the
opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the decisions of courts;
for the courts hold from the national authority, and the theories and
opinions of statesmen may be erroneous. Certain it is that the States
in the American Union have never existed and acted as severally
sovereign states. Prior to