The constitutions imagined by
philosophers are for Utopia, not for any actual, living,
breathing people. You must take the state as it is, and develop
your governmental constitution from it, and harmonize it with it.
Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, the
government has no support in the state, in the organic people, or
nation, and can sustain itself only by corruption or physical
force. A government may be under the necessity of using force to
suppress an insurrection or rebellion against the national
authority, or the integrity of the national territory, but no
government that can sustain itself, not the state, only by
physical force or large standing armies, can be a good government,
or suited to the nation. It must adopt the most stringent
repressive measures, suppress liberty of speech and of conscience,
outrage liberty in what it has the most intimate and sacred, and
practise the most revolting violence and cruelty, for it can
govern only by terror. Such a government is unsuited to the
nation.
This is seen in all history: in the attempt of the dictator Sulla
to preserve the old patrician government against the plebeian
power that time and events had developed in the Roman state, and
which was about to gain the supremacy, as we have seen, at
Pharsalia, Philippi, and Actium; in the efforts to establish a
Jacobinical government in France in 1793; in Rome in 1848, and
the government of Victor Emmanuel in Naples in 1860 and 1861.
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