Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was
not the descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present
Emperor of the French, a decided parvenu. Still, the Emperor of
the French, if only a parvenu, bears himself right imperially
among sovereigns, and has no peer among any of the descendants of
the old royal families of Europe
There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that
constitutions are generated, or developed, not created de novo,
or made all at once. But nothing is more true than that a nation
can alter its constitution by its own deliberate and voluntary
action, and many nations have done so, and sometimes for the
better, as well as for the worse. If the constitution once given is
fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly divine, and contain no
human element, and the people have and can have no hand in their
own government--the fundamental objection to the theocratic
constitution of society. To assume it is to transfer to civil
society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or
supernatural providence, and to maintain that the divine
sovereignty governs in civil society immediately and
supernaturally, as in the spiritual society. But such is not the
fact. God governs the nation by the nation itself, through its
own reason and free-will.
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