nic people attached to a sovereign domain, not the people as
individuals or as a floating or nomadic multitude. By people in the
political sense, Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, understood the
people as the republic, organized in reference to the common or public
good. With this understanding, the sovereignty persists in the people,
and they retain the supreme authority over the government. The powers
delegated are still the powers of the sovereign delegating them, and
may be modified, altered, or revoked, as the sovereign judges proper.
The nation does not, and cannot abdicate or delegate away its own
sovereignty, for sovereign it is, and cannot but be, so long as it
remains a nation not subjected to another nation.

By the imperial constitution of the French government, the imperial
power is vested in Napoleon III., and made hereditary in his family, in
the male line of his legitimate descendants. This is legal, but the
nation has not parted with its sovereignty or bound itself by contract
forever to a Napoleonic dynasty. Napoleon holds the imperial power "by
the grace of God and the will of the nation," which means simply that
he holds his authority from God, through the French people, and is
bound to exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution as the
legislature is to repeal any law it is competent to enact, and in doing
so breaks no contract, violates no right, for Napoleon and his
descendants hold their right to the imperial throne subject to the
national will from which it is derived. In case the nation should
revoke the powers delegated, he or they would have no more valid claim
to the throne than have the Bourbons, whom the nation has unmistakably
dismissed from its service.

The only point here to be observed is, that the change must be by the
nation itself, in its sovereign capacity; not by a mob, nor by a part
of the nation conspiring, intriguing, or rebelling, without any
commission from the nation. The first Napoleon governed by a legal
title, but he was never legally dethroned, and the government of the
Bourbons, whether of the elder branch or the younger, was never a legal
government, for the Bourbons had lost their original rights by the
election of the first Napoleon, and never afterwards had the national
will in their favor. The republic of 1848 was legal, in the sense that
the nation acquiesced in it as a temporary