These efforts, proscriptions, confiscations, military executions,
assassinations, massacres, are all made in the name of liberty,
or in defence of a government supposed to guaranty the well-being
of the state and the rights of the people. They are rendered
inevitable by the mad attempt to force on a nation a constitution
of government foreign to the national constitution, or repugnant
to the national tastes, interests, habits, convictions, or whole
interior life. The repressive policy, adopted to a certain
extent by nearly all European governments, grows out of the
madness of a portion of the people of the several states in
seeking to force upon the nation an anti-national constitution.
The sovereigns may not be very wise, but they are wiser, more
national, more patriotic than the mad theorists who seek to
revolutionize the state and establish a government that has no
hold in the national traditions, the national character, or the
national life; and the statesman, the patriot, the true friend of
liberty sympathizes with the national authorities, not with the
mad theorists and revolutionists.
The right of a nation to change its form of government, and its
magistrates or representatives, by whatever name called, is
incontestable. Hence the French constitution of l789, which
involved that of 1793, was not illegal, for though accompanied by
some irregularities, it was adopted by the manifest will of the
nation, and consented to by all orders in the state.
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