ell
as we can what form it is that our incantations are about to call up
from darkness and the sleep of ages. When the supreme authority of the
people is in question, before we attempt to extend or to confine it, we
ought to fix in our minds, with some degree of distinctness, an idea of
what it is we mean, when we say, the PEOPLE.

In a state of _rude_ Nature there is no such thing as a people. A number
of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people
is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial, and made, like
all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular
nature of that agreement was is collected from the form into which the
particular society has been cast. Any other is not _their_ covenant.
When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which
gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a
people,--they have no longer a corporate existence,--they have no longer
a legal coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized
abroad. They are a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more.
With them all is to begin again. Alas! they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which
has a true politic personality.

We hear much, from men who have not acquired their hardiness of
assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence
of a _majority_, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath
taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such
thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind
another. The power of acting by a majority, which the gentlemen
theorists seem to assume so readily, after they have violated the
contract out of which it has arisen, (if at all it existed,) must be
grounded on two assumptions: first, that of an incorporation produced by
unanimity; and secondly, an unanimous agreement that the act of a mere
majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of
the whole.

We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider
this idea of the decision of a _majority_ as if it were a law of our
original nature. But such constructive whole, residing in a part only,
is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been
or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out of
civil society Nature knows nothing of it; nor are