r object for which
government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed,
Res-Publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally
translated, the public thing. It is a word of a good original, referring
to what ought to be the character and business of government; and in
this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which has a
base original signification. It means arbitrary power in an individual
person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is
the object.

Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or
in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole
object, is not a good government. Republican government is no other than
government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as
well individually as collectively. It is not necessarily connected
with any particular form, but it most naturally associates with the
representative form, as being best calculated to secure the end for
which a nation is at the expense of supporting it.

Various forms of government have affected to style themselves a
republic. Poland calls itself a republic, which is an hereditary
aristocracy, with what is called an elective monarchy. Holland calls
itself a republic, which is chiefly aristocratical, with an hereditary
stadtholdership. But the government of America, which is wholly on the
system of representation, is the only real Republic, in character and in
practice, that now exists. Its government has no other object than the
public business of the nation, and therefore it is properly a republic;
and the Americans have taken care that This, and no other, shall
always be the object of their government, by their rejecting everything
hereditary, and establishing governments on the system of representation
only. Those who have said that a republic is not a form of government
calculated for countries of great extent, mistook, in the first
place, the business of a government, for a form of government; for
the res-publica equally appertains to every extent of territory and
population. And, in the second place, if they meant anything with
respect to form, it was the simple democratical form, such as was the
mode of government in the ancient democracies, in which there was no
representation. The case, therefore, is not, that a republic cannot be
extensive, but that it cannot be extensive on the simple democratical
form; and the ques