vidence.
Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of
right. The good is sometimes overborne, and the bad sometimes
triumphs; but it is consoling, and even just, to believe that the good
oftener triumphs than the bad.

In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law. The
nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the nation.
Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize and apply both
the law of nature and the law of nations, but only on the ground that
they are included, or are presumed to be included, in the national law,
or jurisprudence. Doubtless, too, the nation holds from God, under the
law of nature, but only by virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and
when it is a nation dependent on no other, it holds from God all the
rights and powers of any independent sovereign nation. There is no
right behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation
that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights. In the
case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part of another
people, or subject to another people@ the right of the prior sovereign
must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction of that right is
necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise would be only an
initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli. But that right ceases when
its claimant, willingly or unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons
it; and he does so when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows
no ability or intention of soon renewing it with any reasonable
prospect of success.

The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to sovereignty,
is founded in error. Empty titles to states and kingdoms are of no
validity. The sovereignty is, under God, in the nation and the title
and the possession are inseparable. The title of the Palaeologi to the
Roman Empire of the East, of the king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia,
or the king of Spain--for they are all claimants--to the kingdom of
Jerusalem founded by Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the
thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the
throne of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they
are engrossed. The contrary opinion, so generally entertained, belongs
to barbarism, not to civilization. It is in modern society a relic of
feudalism, which places the state in the government, and makes the
government a private estate--a pr