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entrance fee, which is the condition of the purchase or exchange.

This proposition is inconsistent also with the common language of men, and there is scarcely any fact of deeper significance, or capable of wider illustration, than that which makes a synonym of citizen and freeman.

This proposition implies also a conception of natural freedom which is not a real freedom, but the arbitrariness of the individual, and the freedom of the whole is then only in the limitation of the arbitrariness of each.

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The contrast to this false conception of freedom, was given in words worthy of an inaugural, in the beginning of the history of the nation, by a governor of one of the early commonwealths," There is a twofold liberty, natural — I mean as our nature is now corrupt — and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this man, as he stands in relation to man, simply hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores.' This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against to restrain and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the political covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for not only with the hazard of your goods, but of your lives if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this is not authority but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection

to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty where with Christ hath made us free."1

The great epochs in the lives of nations in the modern world, have been the realization of the freedom of man. It has been said that what the German Reformation whispered in the closet, the French Revolution shouted on the house-tops, that man should be free; and the end of the American War was the assertion that the nation in its conscious spirit is the realization of freedom, and that in the freedom of humanity the nation has its conquest and its end. In the nation freedom is real, and as freedom has its subsistence in the nation, so also in slavery is the resistance to the being of the nation. The nation and slavery cannot abide in one house, but at last the one or the other must be driven out. The nation must overcome and destroy slavery, or at last be destroyed by it. There is in history the evidence of this, and as it appears in the ancient and in the modern world, in the fall of Rome and the uprising of America.

The antagonism with slavery is in the being of the nation. For as the nation is a moral person, and personality is realized in freedom, slavery is its necessary antagonist, and as it is the realization of rights, and in its universal aim of the rights of humanity, slavery with the denial of these rights and with the consequent degradation of humanity, is its immediate antagonist.

There is always a tendency in those withdrawn from the battle, and its "confused noise and garments rolled in blood," to bear its issues into some ideal and abstract sphere. Thus the war is represented as the immediate conflict of the antagonistic ideas, - freedom and slavery. The reality is other than this; the hosts are mustered in no intellectual arena, and the forces called into its field are other than spectral ideas. This tendency to resolve history into the

1 Winthrop's Journal, vol. ii. p. 13.

conflict and progress of abstract ideas, or the development of what is called an intellectual conception, can apprehend nothing of the real passion of history. It knows not what, with so deep significance, is called the burden of history. It enters not into the travail of time, it discerns not the presence of a living Person in the judgments which are the crises of the world. It comprehends only some intellectual conflict in the issue of necessary laws, but not the strife of a living humanity. The process of a legal formula, the evolution of a logical sequence, the supremacy of abstract ideas, this has nothing to compensate for the agony and the suffering and the sacrifice of the actual battle, and it discerns not the real glory of the deliverance of humanity, the real triumph borne through but over death. There was in the war, in the issue which came upon us, even upon us," and in the sacrifice of those who were called, the battle of the nation for its very being, and it was the nation which slavery met in mortal strife. The inevitable conflict was of slavery with the life of the nation.

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There is no vague rhetoric, but a deep truth in the words, "liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable." They are worthy to live upon the lips of the people, for there can be no union without freedom, since slavery has its necessary result in the dissolution of the being of the nation, and there can be no freedom without union, for it is only in the being of the nation that freedom becomes real.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION.

THE freedom of the nation has its correlate in the sovereignty of the nation. Political sovereignty is the assertion of the self-determinate will of the organic people, and in this there is the manifestation of its freedom. It is in and through the determination of its sovereignty that the order of the nation is constituted and maintained.1

The existence of the sovereignty of the nation, or political sovereignty, is indicated by certain signs or notes which are universal: these are, independence, authority, supremacy, unity, and majesty.

The sovereignty of the nation, or political sovereignty, implies independence; it is subject to no external control, but its action is in correspondence with its own determination. It implies authority; it has the strength inherent in its own determination to assert and maintain it. It implies supremacy; this does not presume the presence of other powers which are inferior, but it is itself ultimate and can be subordinate to none; it is suprema potestas. It implies unity; this belongs to the necessary conception of the will from which sovereignty proceeds, and in the will

1 The necessary correlation of sovereignty and freedom was expressed in the common illustration of the old Protestant theologians,-"Liberum et voluntarium sunt synonymia, ac voluntatem non liberam dicere, est perinde ac si quis dicere velit, calidum absque calore." Hegel has a very beautiful statement of the proposition (Philosophie des Rechts, pp. 20-60). "Denn das frei ist der Wille. Wille ohne freiheit ist ein leeres Wort."— Ibid. p. 23. Stahl says, "Desswegen fallen auch Freiheit und Wille in ihrem urbegriff vollig zusammen, der Wille ist frei, und es ist nichts Anderes, frei als nur der Wille."— Philosophie des Rechts, vol. ii. sec. 1, p. 116.

alone, in which there is the highest and essential unity, is the postulate of sovereignty; the presence, thus, of separate supreme powers, to which equal obedience is to be rendered, involves a moral contradiction. It is characterized by an inherent majesty; it is a majesty which manifests itself in all the symbols of the state; it is not simply the dignity of noble action, but it is the conscious possession of powers and obligations, on which depend the highest issues in the history of humanity. This has had its expression always in the historical nations, appearing in the purpose and action of the people in its higher national development.1

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These are the indices by which the presence of political sovereignty is indicated, and in them there is its external manifestation. There are in its content also certain capacities.

It is inalienable; the state cannot transfer it to another nor divest itself of it, except that in the act itself its own. existence and its own freedom terminates.

It is indivisible; a divisive sovereignty is a contradiction of that supremacy which is implied in its necessary conception, and inconsistent with its subsistence in the organic will.

It is indefeasable; 2 it cannot, through legal forms and legists' devices, be annulled and avoided, nor can it be voluntarily abdicated to be voluntarily resumed, but involves a continuity of power and action.

It is irresponsible to any external authority; there is

1 The peoples which were made subject to Rome, were thereby divested of a separate sovereignty, and to all terms made with them, the Romans added, “Imperium majestatemque populi Romani, conservato sine dono malo. — Livy, bk. 38, sec. 2.

แ Majestas est amplitudo ac dignitas civitatis. Is eam minuit, qui exercitum hostibus populi Romani tradidit, minuit is, qui per vim multitudinis, rem ad seditionem vocavit. — Cicero, De Oratore, bk. ii. sec. 38.

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2 It is incapable by any juggle based upon legal analogies, of being defeated or abrogated. In the expression of James Wilson, “sovereignty is and remains in the people." -Jamison's Constitutional Convention, p. 20.

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