, and is so still in most states.
France and the United States are the principal exceptions in
Christendom. Property alone, or coupled with birth, is made elsewhere
in some form a basis of political power, and where made so by the
sovereign authority, it is legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for
it takes from the weak and gives to the strong. The rich have in their
riches advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the
state any additional advantage. An aristocracy, in the sense of
families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services, wealth,
cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable in every
nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief support, but they
need and should receive no political recognition. They should form no
privileged class in the state or political society.

CHAPTER VII

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.

The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation,
and the constitution of the government. The constitution of the
government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the
constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its
origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through
historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the
other in historical fact. The nation must exist, and exist as a
political community, before it can give itself a constitution; and no
state, any more than an individual, can exist without a constitution of
some sort.

The distinction between the providential constitution of the people and
the constitution of the government, is not always made. The
illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers
who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in
his work on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions,
maintains that constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all
human agency from their formation and growth. Disgusted with French
Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much,
and deeply wedded to monarchy in both church and state, he had the
temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal families for the
government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a
good government without a king who has descended from one of those
divinely created royal families. It was with some such thought, most
likely, that a French journalist, writing home