Popular sovereignty

“ I think a definition of genuine popular sovereignty in the abstract would be about this: that each man shall do precisely as he pleases with himself, and with all those things which exclusively concern him. Applied to governments, this principle would be, that a general government shall do all those things which pertain to it ”

“ But, contradictorily, one cannot fail to realize that national unity remains unchanged regardless of the change in national polity.
Popular sovereignty should be considered a change in recognition of the people. Inadvertently speaking, the idea of popular sovereignty is not an entirely new one. ”

“ Finally, the ultimate agency of popular sovereignty is the power of the people to amend their constitutions. So far as the state constitutions are concerned they accept or reject proposed changes by their own votes; in the case of the national constitution they act through their representatives in Congress and in the state legislatures. By these four methods of control we maintain what is known as the sovereignty of the people. ”

“ THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION At the beginning of this discussion popular Sovereignty was declared to be the essential condition of democracy; and a general account of the nature of a constructive democratic ideal can best be brought to a close by a definition of the meaning of the phrase, popular Sovereignty, consistent with a nationalist interpretation of democracy. ”

“ How, then, can any man, in the name of Popular Sovereignty, vote another to be a slave? How, then, can any man, in this name, assert property in his fellow-man? By what excuse, with what reason, on what argument can any such thing be done, without first denying all that is true and sacred? Liberty, which is the active principle of Popular Sovereignty,—Equality, which is twin sister of Liberty,—and Justice, which sets bounds to all that men do on earth,—these are the irresistible enemies of Slavery, each and all of which must be trampled out by any rule under which man can be made a slave. ”

“ If, ten years ago, a man had undertaken to call this popular sovereignty, the people would have suspected him of serious mental derangement. Is not really this kind of popular sovereignty, according to Mr. ”

“ Dear Sir,—The fundamental article of my political creed is, that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor; equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical. ”

“ The power which is committed to the hands of every citizen of this Commonwealth—the power of controlling public sentiment through his speech and of directing the public affairs through his vote—the power of national sovereignty in which he participates as one of the sovereign people—is a solemn trust. ”

“ At a time when the true danger is that sections or classes should arrogate to themselves authority which belongs to the State, it is an advantage to bring into prominence the sovereignty of the nation. ”

“ But with these broad admissions, if we would compare the sovereignty acknowledged to exist in the mass of our people with the power claimed by other sovereignties, even by those which have been considered most purely democratic, we shall find a most essential difference. ”

“ Taking a prince as a simple and normal organ of government, he analyzes the subjection of princes to their ministers, to priests, to mistresses, to the violent protests of an insubordinate people. No influence that the prince can throw off without losing his own authority, he thinks, can be a sovereign influence; but any influence which can threaten his power if he resists is a sovereign influence, the true depository of supreme political power. Sovereignty thus becomes a catalogue of influences. ”

“ We knew, that, when the people truly realized their sovereignty, they would claim not only the utilitarian, but the artistic and munificent attributes of their throne,—and that all the splendors and decorations, all the provisions for leisure, taste, and recreation, which kings and courts have made, would be found to be mere preludes and rehearsals to the grander arrangements and achievements of the vastly richer and more legitimate sovereign, the People, when he understood his own right and duty. ”

“ The foreign state is the true and real owner of its public vessels of war. The reigning Emperor, or National Assembly, or other actual person or party in power, is but the agent and representative of the national sovereignty. ”

“ He did more than any other public man of the time to lessen the force of State attachments, to create a national feeling, and to lead the public mind to a comprehension of the necessity for an efficient national sovereignty. ”

“ This sovereign, this person or combination of persons, universally occurring in all independent political communities, has in all such communities one characteristic, common to all the shapes sovereignty may take, the possession of irresistible force, not necessarily exerted, but capable of being exerted. ”

“ Hence, while the sovereignty resides inherently and inalienably in the people, it is a perversion of language to denominate the State, as a body politic or government, sovereign and independent.—Ibid., p. ”

“ Well, then, let all admit, what none deny, that the only source of political power in this country is the people. Let us admit that they are sovereign, for they are so; that is to say, the aggregate community, the collected will of the people, is sovereign. ”

“ But this does not mean what Judge Jameson reads into it, that sovereignty and the feeling of the community are one and the same thing; that the conditions of sovereignty and the exercise of sovereignty are identical. Sovereignty has at all times and under all systems of government been dependent upon the temper and disposition of the people. The will of the community, the inclinations and desires of the body politic as a whole, are always, in the last analysis, the foundation, as they are also in many instances the direct and immediate source, of law. ”

“ All governments, properly speaking, in which the sovereignty is held to rest in the people or political community, and the king or emperor holds from the community and represents the the majority of the state, are Republican, as was Imperial Rome or is Imperial France; all governments, on the other in which the sovereignty vests not in the political community, but in the individual and is held as a personal right, or as a private estate, are in principal monarchical. ”

“ Article I. The high contracting powers, being convinced that the system of representative government is equally as incompatible with the monarchical principles as the maxim of the sovereignty of the people with the divine right, engage mutually, in the most solemn manner, to use all their efforts to put an end to the system of representative governments, in whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its being introduced in those countries where it is not yet known. ”

“ By allowing to the people that species of sovereignty, which can be found in suffrage and representation, and no other, it results, that the people may be deprived of free discussion without injuring their sovereignty ”

“ When we listen so frequently to such abstract terms as “the majesty of the people,” “the sovereignty of the people,” whence the inference that “all power is derived from the people,” we can form no definite notions: it is “a confusion of words,” contradicting all the political experience which our studies or our observations furnish; for sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct, and to settle the vacillations and quick passions of the multitude. ”

“ Then, my friends, be sure of it, whatever the allied monarchs of Europe may do, whatever the plots of the royalists and priests, the Republic, the Revolution, France, will be saved without the sovereignty of the people having been violated in the person of a single one of its Representatives in the Commune or the Convention, even of those most opposed to new ideas ”

“ A republic, where the people at large, either collectively or by representation, form the legislature.
The separate advantages of monarchy are unity of council, decision, secrecy, and dispatch; the military strength and energy resulting from these qualities of government; the exclusion of popular and aristocratical contentions; the preventing, by a known rule of succession, all competition for the supreme power, thereby repressing the dangerous hopes and intrigues of aspiring citizens. ”

“ Until dissolved, it is the master of the government, or the real political sovereignty; but the natural right of self government, is superior to any political sovereignty. The ancient notion of a social compact between nations and their governments or monarchs, alone sufficed to corrupt them. ”

“ If the national government shows itself so regardless of the honor and interests of a State as has been evinced by the cold indifference with which negotiations for the last fifty years have been carried on, it becomes the solemn duty of the sovereignty thus trampled upon to rise and maintain its own rights. ”

“ The ruler will confiscate the rights of the community to himself and will become the embodiment of sovereignty, which is what happened in most of the states of Europe at the close of the middle ages; or the community, acting through some body politic which is its virtual representative, will confine the head of the government to defined functions. ”

“ Under our confederate system, sovereignty is that highest political power which, at its pleasure, creates governments and delegates authority to them. Sovereignty grants powers, but not sovereign powers ”

“ Sovereign power ought in all commonwealths to be absolute. So that it appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from reason, and Scripture, that the sovereign power, whether placed in one man, as in monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in popular, 195and aristocratical commonwealths, is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it. ”

“ If success is the proof of the grace of God, then it is the only source of legitimate sovereignty, and the royalists would be obliged to recognize as legitimate rulers, any and every foreign conqueror, president of a republic, governor or potentate of any kind whose ambitious efforts had met with success. ”

“ This government, Sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It is not the creature of State legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on State sovereignties. ”

“ The same principle has compelled the rulers of most of the European nations to divide the responsibility of government with their subjects, and to grant their people enlarged powers but little short of absolute sovereignty. ”

“ It has been shown that, in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league, they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right to make treaties, declare war, levy taxes, exercise exclusive judicial and legislative powers, were all functions of sovereign power. ”

“ To invest Congress with the exclusive sovereignty in every matter relative to foreign nations and the general mass of our Union, retaining to the States their individual sovereignty in matters merely domestic. ”

“ The nation-king cannot exercise its sovereignty itself; it is obliged to delegate it to agents: this is constantly reiterated by those who seek to win its favor. Be these agents five, ten, one hundred, or a thousand, of what consequence is the number; and what matters the name? It is always the government of man, the rule of will and caprice. I ask what this pretended revolution has revolutionized? ”

“ Thus, rulers in the civil community should have political prudence in a supreme degree, or statesmanship, so that they may be able to discharge well the function of sovereignty entrusted to them, whether as legislators by deliberating wisely and choosing suitable laws, or as judges by correctly interpreting and applying the law, or as executives by maintaining the government and enforcing its laws. ”

“ They are the covenants of a community. Time out of mind communities have made covenants with their sovereigns. When despotism in France was ‘tempered by epigram,’ the sharp tongues of the wits spoke, after a sort, the constitution of the country,—a positive law whose sanction89 was ridicule. But the wits were not sovereign; the salons did not conduct government. Our written constitutions are only very formal statements of the standards to which the people, upon whom government depends for support, will hold those who exercise the sovereign power. ”

“ But though the sovereignty be not mixed, but be always either simple democracy, or simple aristocracy, or pure monarchy, nevertheless in the administration thereof, all those sorts of government may have place subordinate. ”

“ Thus for the sovereignty, in an impalpable and unnatural sense, of the general will, we get a sovereignty, in the natural and demonstrable sense, of the multitude. But as the multitude is not everywhere supreme, the assertion of its sovereignty has to be put in the form that it is sovereign 'de jure.' The truth which underlies this proposition is that an interest in common good is the ground of political society, in the sense that without it no body of people would recognise any authority as having a claim on their common obedience. ”

“ Hence the origin of republicanism and the establishment of commonwealths, in which the sovereignty was acknowledged to reside in the body of the people, and where such of the citizens as by abilities, rank, friends, were qualified, might rule in vicarious succession. ”

“ Notwithstanding the limited sovereignty possessed by the people of the United Stages and the restricted grant of power to the Government which they have adopted, enough has been given to accomplish all the objects for which it was created. It has been found powerful in war, and hitherto justice has been administered, and intimate union effected, domestic tranquillity preserved, and personal liberty secured to the citizen. ”