All political questions proper, such as the
elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution of the several
departments of government, as the legislative, the judicial, and
the executive, changing, altering, or amending the constitution
of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a word,
all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take
the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the
government, but to the convention; and where the will of the
sovereign is not sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a
new appeal to the convention is necessary, and may always be had.
The constitution of Great Britain makes no distinction between
the convention and the government. Theoretically the
constitution of Great Britain is feudal, and there is, properly
speaking, no British state; there are only the estates, king,
lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute the
Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the
plenitude of political sovereignty. The British Parliament,
composed of the three estates, possesses in itself all the
powers of the convention in the American constitution, and is at
once the convention and the government. The imperial
constitution of France recognizes no convention, but clothes the
senate with certain political functions, which, in some
respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his creature.
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