The Gothic chiefs
hold their power by a personal title, and have the same authority
in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
Elbe or the Danube. Power migrates with the chief and his
people, and may be exercised wherever he and they find
themselves, as a Swedish queen held when she ordered the
execution of one of her subjects at Paris, without asking
permission of the territorial lord. In these nations, power is a
personal right, or a private estate, not a state which exists
only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the domain,
exists independently of the chief or the government. The
distinction is between public domain and private domain.
The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is
territorial, not personal; not territorial because the majority
of the people are agriculturists or landholders, but because all
political rights, powers, or franchises are territorial. The
sovereign people of the United States are sovereign only within
the territory of the United States. The great body of the
freemen have the elective franchise, but no one has it save in
his State, his county, his town, his ward, his precinct. Out of
the election district in which he is domiciled, a citizen of the
United States has no more right to vote than has the citizen or
subject of a foreign state.
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