The republic of 1848 was legal, in the sense that the
nation acquiesced in it as a temporary necessity; but hardly
anybody believed in it or wanted it, and the nation accepted it
as a sort of locum tenens, rather than willed or ordained it.
Its overthrow by the coup d'etat may not be legally defensible,
but the election of Napoleon III. condoned the illegality, if
there was any, and gave the emperor a legal title, that no
republican, that none but a despot or a no-government man can
dispute. As the will of the nation, in so far as it contravenes
not the law of God or the law of nature, binds every individual
of the nation, no individual or number of individuals has, or can
have, any right to conspire against him, or to labor to oust him
from his place, till his escheat has been pronounced by the voice
of the nation. The state, in its sovereign capacity, willing it,
is the only power competent to revoke or to change the form and
constitution of the imperial government. The same must be said
of every nation that has a lawful government; and this, while it
preserves the national sovereignty, secures freedom of progress,
condemns all sedition, conspiracy, rebellion, revolution, as does
the Christian law itself.
CHAPTER IX.
THE UNITED STATES
Sovereignty, under God, inheres in the organic people, or the
people as the republic; and every organic people fixed to the
soil, and politically independent of every other people, is a
sovereign people, and, in the modern sense, an independent
sovereign nation.
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