The reader will observe, in the follow-policy respected, in all measures of admining argument, which we think a conclusive istration. But neither is this the kind of one, that the author has touched very light- sovereignty with which the laws are techly on the inferior member of his subject, nically conversant; being a sovereignty of namely, on the duties and relations of our position and estate, rather than of active national legislators in their merely repre- control; of circumstantial predominance, sentative capacity, but has restricted him- than of exerted authority. self to a development of the scientific idea of a national legislator, elected, indeed, by his district, and yet, under the Constitution, free to act and vote for what seems to him the good of the whole.-ED.

Let us be more exact. The people's sovereignty under the Constitution is a power in the government as well as over it; a power which the Constitution recognizes and makes use of for its own ends in the established organism of the State, giving it work to do, and in a fixed, unalterable line of action; in short, a strictly functionary power; as much so as the power of the President, or of a Judge of the Supreme Court.

OURS is an agency government, and therefore of the kind denominated free; a government, however, that is in theory as remote from pure democracy on the one hand as from pure monarchy on the other. The fathers called it republican; meaning It follows, that this sovereignty, bethereby to give it not simply a description sides being of a qualified nature, is but a name, and for the very purpose of also limited in extent. Nor is the measkeeping up this double discrimination. ure of it hard to take; being just what It was not intended that the people should remains, of the whole mass of functionmanage it themselves; and yet it was in-ary powers organic to our system, after detended to place it under a decisive popular influence and control, by having the agents, who were to be its managers, appointed by the general voice of the country for short terms; re-eligible afterwards, indeed, but only upon condition of their being still acceptable to the people, who were to re-appoint or dismiss them at pleasure by a new expression of the same general voice.

It will be well if we discriminate as the fathers did. There is danger that we may not. The subject is too much declaimed upon to leave the lines of exact truth always visible. The people are daily told without reserve, not only that they are sovereigns, but that their sovereignty is unlimited and unqualified. This is true in a vague sense, but to a legal ear it is eminently false.

The thing may be looked at in various lights. In one, the people are above the Constitution itself; for they can pull down the glorious structure if they will, and either rebuild it afterwards, or leave it in ruins. This however is not legal sovereignty. In another view, the people are above, not the Constitution, but the government organized under it; forasmuch as they are the acknowledged proprietaries of the system, the parties in interest, to whom everything belongs, and whose welfare is to be consulted, and their views of

ducting therefrom the powers devolved upon government agents for the performance of their duties. The result is plain enough. Those devolved powers are all administrative-appertaining to government in the ordinary meaning of the term; that is to say, to the various offices of the legislative, executive, and judicial departments, familiar to every one's knowledge. Such is the subtrahend of our arithmetical problem. What then must the people's remainder be? What but the organizing and visitatorial power of the ballot-box--the electoral sovereignty?

Nor is this sovereignty original in the people. No functionary power can be older than the organism it belongs to. Much is said about the "reserved rights" of the people, and in a connection to show that rights of power are meant. It is a delusion. How could rights of any sort bearing solely on the government, exist before the government itself? And if they did not pre-exist, how could they be reserved, or kept back, when the government was formed? They necessarily took their date from that period. They were the very creatures of the Constitution. And it was by the Constitution that they were first imparted to the popular electors. The right of voting at political elections is truly what it has been called, a franchise—an

functionary power, can be no larger than the power is. The people, in their capacity of electors, may do all that is within the proper scope of the franchise; but it is usurpation to do more.

And this enables us to condemn without reserve an opinion strangely prevalent in some parts of the country, to the effect that when a man is chosen to an office, and especially an office of legislation, it is the right of his constituents to have pledges from him as to the measures he will advo

come upon him afterwards, during his term, with dictatorial instructions on the subject. Nor are the holders of this opinion so inconsiderable, either in standing or ability, as to allow of its being passed over in silence.

Besides, if this electoral sovereignty had been a thing of original right in the people, antecedent to the Constitution, it would belong to every one-man, woman, child --so far at least as there is no want of discretion for the use of it; whereas we do not find it so vested, only a portion not a third part probably, nor a fourth-cate or oppose in public life; and even to of the whole community being legal voters; women and minors having none of it; many adult male citizens having none of it, for lack of the requisite qualifications of residence, property, tax-paying, and the like. How is this? Are these unvoting citizens disfranchised by the Constitution? Is it not more sensible to say, that every franchise being a trust, or at least involving one, the electoral franchise has been given to such only of the people as are deemed fit and competent trustees of so important a power, and qualified to use it with advantage to the republic? Thus, instead of taking away anything from three-fourths of the community, the Constitution simply imparts to the remaining fourth a right of its own creation, which was never theirs before.

And let me add, it does this, not for their sakes in particular, but for the equal good of all without distinction. There is no peculiar value in the privilege of depositing ballots in a box with a hole in it, the act alone considered; nor have they to whom the privilege is not conceded any serious cause of present unhappiness on that account. The only question of interest for them, as for others, is upon the likelihood of results to the country; that is to say, whether the right of suffrage is distributed widely enough among the people, on the one hand, to make the elections duly popular in the spirit of them, and restrained, on the other, to a number sufficiently small and select to make it probable that they will be conducted with reasonable intelligence and prudence, so that upon the whole, the true advantages designed by this part of the constitutional arrangement may be fairly hoped for from its plan of operation.

Of course the liberty that waits upon a

Upon what, then, do they ground themselves? The notion seems to be, that an election is a delegation of power, and so, that a pledge exacted from the candidate is but a condition annexed to a free gift; in other words, that the electors being the donors of the authority with which the man of their choice becomes thereupon endowed, have a natural right to be served with it in the way they think best.

But here is certainly a misconception. The electors confer no power, not a particle.

How can they? They have none to confer. Had they the power themselves, they could exercise it. Otherwise it would not be power. As then they have it not, they cannot delegate or pass it over to another. Suppose the elected officer should die suddenly, and a vacancy happen; would his power fall back upon the electors' hands? No, for again, they could make no use of it. Their right of suffrage would indeed revive; another congé d'élire from the Constitution would put them into further action as its functionaries for appointing a successor. work is ended till new casualties make new room for it. But suppose, instead of dying, the officer plays truant, and is guilty of malversation; can his constituents intrude upon him and amend his doings? No; culprit though he be, the office, so long as he continues in it, is his, not theirs. When his term is up, to be sure, he may be called by them to a species of account. But even that will not be in the way of jurisdictional review; for they can do

This done, their

nothing, absolutely nothing, with the func- | is a very good reason for ordering matters

Will it be said that Senators, from the peculiarity of their being appointed by the States as such, and not by popular suffrage, are beyond the scope of this reasoning? and that they must be regarded as representing their respective States or State governments, more strictly and closely than they do the country at large? Let us try this.

for the office? And especially, in reference to the jurisdiction, the authority, the power, which the incumbent is to be put in charge of, does it come by the office, or by the man? Is it appurtenant or in gross?-a power, in other words, which the man finds in his station, when he gets there, or which he carries thither in his pocket with his credentials of election?

Let the subject be honestly dealt with. An electoral appointment has no creative energy, save only as regards the connection of the appointed individual with the post to which it advances him. His ser

Have the State Legislators any original authority for appointing national Senators? That will not be said. They get their power then from the Constitution. And who made the Constitution? "We, the people," is its own emphatic response. Touch-vices it undoubtedly destines to a new eming the matter in hand, therefore, the Constitution is a general letter of attorney, by which " we, the people," give to each of the State Legislatures, in trust, an elective franchise for filling two places in the National Senate. It is a franchise indeed, and like every other franchise, has a trust annexed to it. For whose benefit, do you ask? That of the donors, the nation at large. And thus the State Legislators are the fiduciary agents of the Union for appointing Union Senators.

These Senators again are agents. But whose agents? That is the point. Are they the agents of the agency-legislatures that appoint them, or of the real principals in the whole business, the people of the Union? How can trustees of a franchise, more than of anything else, claim the fruit of it to themselves?

In one respect, a public officer may be looked upon as a result of the joint action of his immediate constituents and the country at large; the office (without which the man were nothing) having its existence by the Constitutional enactment of the nation, while the man (without whom the office would exist in vain) is furnished by the local electors. But because the more extensively popular part of the work is antecedent to the other in order of time, being the effect of a transaction long since past, and seemingly forgotton by many; there is danger lest the noisier and more bustling performance of the hour, however small the theatre it is done upon, however few the actors, may have an undue relative magnitude ascribed to it. Men should ask themselves a question or two in the matter. What is it to provide an office, in comparison with providing an incumbent

ployment. And that is all it does. The line of employment, the office, is a thing of earlier date, and which cannot be touched. Its settled pre-existence is indeed assumed by the very act of providing an incumbent for it.

If, then, we can analyze this fixture of the Constitution called office, and see what its ingredients are, we may, to some extent, determine what public men possess which their constituents have not given them, and over which there can of course be no right of dictation left behind in the legislature, or district, where elections have been made.

The task is easy. Office, wherever it exists, and whatever be the ends it is to answer, is essentially a compound of duty and power: the duty of fulfilling its functionary intent, (for it is always functionary,) and the power requisite for that purpose. This power and duty, therefore, have, in every possible case, their origin and measure from the constituents of the office, and not of the officer who fills it for the time being; which is just equivalent to saying (where the office is national) that they are the property of the nation, and not in any sense or degree the gift of local electors, or amenable to their control. The very nature of things teaches us this.

And well that it does. We want arguments for minds of various mould, and which are under various influences. If the too prevalent doctrine of the day were to prevail, we might live to see the President and Senate overruling the freedom of the judges, as being their immediate constituents. Why not? What better right have the State Legislatures to put trammels upon Union Senators? Nay, we

but they were true parents, and held the liberty of their children in equal esteem. What did they do? Alike careful of the future and the present-of the remainder

might live to see boards of Presidential | held their own liberty sufficiently dear, Electors assemble long after their true function has been exercised and spent, to instruct the political Executive how to bear himself in his high walk of State. If suffrage were essentially a delegation of pow-in fee, as of the life-estate--they made siger, these absurdities would be no longer such. If the authors of men's official preferment were the makers of their officers too, government would not be government; the only sovereignty of the land would be in the local electorships, and the affairs of the nation would be carried on by and for them as such, and in the way of mere diplomacy.

nal provision for both the one and the other of their objects, by placing each in charge of a distinct portion of the sovereign power; giving the law-making and law-executing management of things to a set of persons who were to be singled out for the purpose, with a scrupulous regard to character and fitness-while the conservative oversight of this agency-corps of government, with a view to saving the republic harmless in their hands at all events, was given to an immense mass of popular electors; too many to be capable of betraying their trust, and yet not numerous The best frame of government for any enough to include the dregs of society, given country, is that which provides best, who might be unworthy of it. Such is first, for the rights and interests of the our political division of labor. The dipeople, and secondly, for its own health-rectly governing sovereignty belongs to ful continuance. Both these objects are vital.

Why will men lose sight as they do of that great act of universal sovereignty, the Constitution? And why will they shut their eyes to the very genius and policy of it on the precise topic in hand?

But each of them, it is plain, has exigencies of its own, to be specially looked after by the founders of States. To combine the two successfully, is perhaps the noblest, because the most extensively beneficial achievement, that human wisdom can aim at. In most governments no effort has been made in that direction. I know of none but ours in which the thing has been seriously attempted.

Mark then the most interesting peculiarity of our system, and, God be praised, the most hopeful.

Our Constitutional fathers were not more considerate for themselves than for those who should come after them. They

official rulers for the time being-an independent, ultimate, administrative power in their hands. But because such power is corrupting and dangerous, these rulers, sovereign though they be, in their place, are held in check by regulations making it necessary for them to apply from time to time for new commissions at the bar of public opinion, or to descened into private life. So that the electoral sovereignty, to which the enormous power of public opinion appertains, is influentially paramount, as in truth it should be; though for any purpose of direct action, it is co-ordinate with that of governing agents; a power in the government as well as theirs, and no more free to trespass upon them, than they are to invade its own domain.