he peace and order of society than "the solidarity of
peoples" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary,
the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia
has emancipated her serfs.

The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute government according to
its own judgment, under any form it pleases--monarchical, aristocratic,
democratic, or mixed--vest all power in an hereditary monarch, in a
class or hereditary nobles, in a king and two houses of parliament, one
hereditary, the other elective, or both elective; or it may establish a
single, dual, or triple executive, make all officers of government
hereditary or all elective, and if elective, elective for a longer or a
shorter time, by universal suffrage or a select body of electors. Any
of these forms and systems, and many others besides, are or may be
legitimate, if established and maintained by the national will. There
is nothing in the law of God or of nature, antecedently to the national
will, that gives any one of them a right to the exclusion of any one of
the others. The imperial system in France is as legitimate as the
federative system in the United States. The only form or system that
is necessarily illegal is the despotic. That can never be a truly
civilized government, nor a legitimate government, for God has given to
man no dominion over man. He gave men, as St. Augustine says, and Pope
St. Gregory the Great repeats, dominion over the irrational creation,
not over the rational, and hence the primitive rulers of men were
called pastors or shepherds, not lords. It may be the duty of the
people subjected to a despotic government to demean themselves quietly
and peaceably towards it, as a matter of prudence, to avoid sedition,
and the evils that would necessarily follow an attempted revolution,
but not because, founded as it is on mere force, it has itself any
right or legality.

All other forms of government are republican in their essential
constitution, founded on public right, and held under God from and for
the commonwealth, and which of them is wisest and best for the
commonwealth is, for the most part, an idle question. "Forms of
government," somebody has said, "are like shoes--that is the best form
which best fit the feet that are to wear them." Shoes are to be fitted
to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and
conformation. There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from