The one originates in law, the other in historical fact. The
nation must exist, and exist as a political community, before it
can give itself a constitution; and no state, any more than an
individual, can exist without a constitution of some sort.
The distinction between the providential constitution of the
people and the constitution of the government, is not always
made. The illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest
political philosophers who wrote in the last century, or the
first quarter of the present, in his work on the Generative
Principle of Political Constitutions, maintains that
constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all human
agency from their formation and growth. Disgusted with French
Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so
much, and deeply wedded to monarchy in both church and state, he
had the temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal
families for the government of nations, and that it is idle for a
nation to expect a good government without a king who has
descended from one of those divinely created royal families. It
was with some such thought, most likely, that a French
journalist, writing home from the United States, congratulated
the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army, so that
when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to do,
they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
emperor.
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