emanation of power from the national foun- | tain-head, descending thence upon those who are to exercise it. To talk of a reserved franchise, would be a positive solecism. 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 fourthof 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 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 advocate or oppose in public life; and even to 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. 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. This done, their 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 nothing, absolutely nothing, with the func- | is a very good reason for ordering matters tion he may have abused. They are electors only. They can touch the man, should he ask a re-election; they can refuse to trust him again; but this is all the penalty they can inflict. as they are, in this momentous branch of our concerns. The policy of the thing should be considered. Distributive elections must be resorted to in a wide country like ours. We use them, not to alter the character of results, but for convenience sake. It is because the people cannot well act in mass, and fill all the posts of government by a general ticket, so call If then the officer's power is not given him by his constituents, whence, you will say, does it come? I answer, from the Constitution; it is laid up there in waiting for him, against the day of his appointed, that the business has been economiment. The electors choose him, designate him, give him their certificate of approval; the Constitution does the rest. A member of the lower House of Congress is chosen, we will suppose, by the qualified voters of Ontario or Albany, in the State of New York. He is called the representative of his district. A representative from it would be better language; for though he truly represent his own district, that is but a fraction of his representative character, since he stands in just the same relation to every other part of the country. Is this doubted? How then does he get to be a national legislator? Can a handful of local electors make him such that is, give him a sovereign lawmaking power over twenty millions of people? The duties of the office are as far-reaching as its sway. However obscurely local his appointment may have been, he be comes at once a servant of the commonwealth; voting as freely, and under the very same obligation to vote wisely and properly, for a custom-house at Portsmouth or Mobile; for a breakwater in the Chesapeake; for a railroad, it may be, to Oregon; as for a mole in Buffalo harbor in his own State. His trust, like his commission, is that of a legislator at large for the Union. Who imposes or reposes that trust? Could the voice of Albany or Ontario do it, as the lawyers say, per se? Let not forms deceive us. Let not the dioms of political declamation deceive us. Representatives in Congress have indeed their several constituencies, to which they seem to be indebted for everything. The suffrages they receive are all local. The gratitude inspired by these suffrages has of course, and very justly, a corresponding direction. Forms and feelings thus combine to shut the Constitution out of view, and to make men forgetful that there cally parcelled out among a multitude of territorial districts, each voting for one or more candidates according to the measure of its population, and taking no concern in the election of the rest; the same end being thus secured with ease through the separate action of several hundred communities, which it would be so difficult to reach intelligently and promptly by a combined movement. What better expedient could be hit upon? Organization is the point. The people must have government officers. How best to choose them is the question. Two modes offer:-a general ticket for the whole land, or a host of tickets in detail for all the parts of it. Were the general-ticket scheme adopted, and the entire body of the people put to vote for every officer in the list, one consequence must follow,-the successful candidates would be admitted on all hands to be national agents, national representatives; and the absurdity of their being any of them servants of particular districts in special, and liable to dictation from particular groups of electors, would have no advocates. I take this for granted. But it seems the other mode has been preferred, and so the public service is to be provided for by the self-same people, acting not in mass, but in a vast number of subdivisions. No change of object. National officers are still the thing wanted. And they are wanted for the identical places and functions as before. What difference then in nationality of results? The people act in separate companies, but they all act, and with a common purpose,—namely, to officer the government. In one respect they may be held, in fair construction, to be all active in every part of the work. The arrangement is theirs by which the forms of the proceeding have been adjusted; being the arrangement of the Constitution itself. 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." 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. Touching 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 | 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 services it undoubtedly destines to a new employment. 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 arge ments for minds of various mould, which are under various influenc the too prevalent doctrine of the to prevail, we might live to see dent and Senate overruling th the judges, as being the stituents. Why no have the State mels upon 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 offi- | cers 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. RECENT ENGLISH HISTORIANS OF ANCIENT GREECE.* (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 190.) AFTER the return of the Heraclidae-esting of the two, as he has the greater which Thirlwall Euemerizes into a Doric dexterity in rendering a dry subject atinvasion and conquest, requiring "many tractive, and illustrates his details by noting years, probably many generations," for the differences as well as the resemblances its consummation, and Grote disposes of of climate, natural productions, cultivation, among the mythes of the legendary age &c., in Ancient and Modern Greece. we pass at once to the definite region of Historical Greece. Not that even here we are entirely freed from uncertainty, but the races and institutions at which we arrive are real and tangible, though in some cases-that of Lycurgus is a well-known instance-a cloud may still hang about their founders. We can always be pretty sure what laws, customs, and form of government existed in each place at a particular time, though something fabulous may still cling to the individual personages of the period. It is here, accordingly, that Mr. Grote takes occasion to bring in his sketch of Grecian geography. Something of the kind is generally considered a necessary introduction to a history: we confess to having some doubts of its indispensability. Arnold's most valuable and interesting work on Rome contains no geographical account of Italy; and yet, singularly enough, Arnold himself has elsewhere insisted on the importance and necessity of the ordinary course; nay, more, he illustrates its value by immediate reference to Italy, the natural features of which he proceeds to describe in his most felicitous manner. A good map is certainly always a requisite, and with this probably most readers would be satisfied. We half suspect that few persons, except conscientious reviewers like ourselves, peruse these geographical introductions. Both our authors are full and accurate in this part of their work; Grote, the more spirited and inter And now before treating of the Peloponnesian Dorians, we have one more troublesome subject to adjust or get over in some way. Every student of Greek and Roman history has been more than once brought to a stand by the Pelasgi, an extinct people who seem to have been used as a convenient solution for all the problems in the archæology of the nations around the Mediterranean, much as electricity was once employed in physical philosophy to account for all unknown phenomena. The anxious inquirer, after laboring to shape some definite and consistent conclusion out of the various conflicting statements of ancient writers, and the still more conflicting inferences drawn from every one of these statements by modern scholars, generally has to end by confessing himself hopelessly puzzled. Whoever has worked through Niebuhr, and Thirlwall, and Malden, and Michelet-whoever has tried to form a coherent opinion of his own on the principal questions in dispute: whether the Pelasgians spoke Greek, or something very different from Greek; whether Herodotus ought to have written Croton where he wrote Creston, or Dionysius ought to have quoted Creston where he quoted Cro ton; whether the Tyrsenian Pelasgians came from Greece to Italy or vice versa, or whether they ever were in Italy at all; whether the real name of the people whom we know through the Romans as Etruscans was Rasena, or whether these Rasena * A History of Greece, by the Right Rev. CONNOP THIRLWALL. London: Longman & Co. 1835, 1844. A History of Greece, by GEO. GROTE, Esq. London: John Murray. 1846-7. + Lectures on Modern History, pp. 123, 124, 125, 128, 129. Prof. Malden, of the London University, who began a History of Rome for the Library of Useful knowledge" in 1830. The early numbers were remarkably promising, but under the fatality which seems to attend histories of Rome, it stopped short after the fifth. |