or law common to all civilized nations. Under this law, whose
prescriptions are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal
jurisprudence, nations are providentially constituted, and invested
with political sovereignty; and as they are constituted under this law
and hold from God through it, it defines their respective rights and
powers, their limitation and their extent.
The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the
people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or political
society. It is vested in the political community or nation, not in an
individual, or family, or a class, because, under the natural law, all
men are equal, as they are under the Christian law, and one man has, in
his own right, no authority over another. The family has in the father
a natural chief, but political society has no natural chief or chiefs.
The authority of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when
his children have attained to majority, have married and become heads
of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the paternal
household. The recognition of the authority of the father beyond the
limits of his own household, is, if it ever occurs, by virtue of the
ordinance, the consent, express or tacit, of the political society.
There are no natural-born political chiefs, and wherever we find men
claiming or acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the
Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or
constitution of the people or the nation.
Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically developed
from the authority of the patriarchs, and have unquestionably been
sustained by an equally false development of the right of property,
especially landed property. The owner of the land, or he who claimed
to own it, claimed as an incident of his ownership the right to govern
it, and consequently to govern all who occupied it. But however valid
may be the landlord's title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can
own any thing in land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the
law of nature no political right. Property, like all natural rights,
is entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.
Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a
question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme
political authority. It was the basis, and almost exclusive basis, in
the Middle Ages, under feudalism
|