CHAPTER V.

THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND.

THE people and the land form the natural elements of the nation, in its physical unity and circumstance; they exist in a necessary inter-relation.

The people in its organic unity, constitutes the nation. It is not a sum or an aggregate of men, a chance collection accumulated as an heap of fragmentary atoms; it is not a mob, but a people; not a vulgus but a populus. It is not a party nor a sect, nor a mere association of parties and sects, nor a combination of separate corporate interests, nor of individuals in the partnership of their private interests, and there is in none of these the consciousness of the unity and of the order which belong to a nation. With the mob, a detached and unformed mass of isolated individuals, it has nothing to do, and they can have nothing to do with it.1

The people is not determinate in any enumeration of individuals. It is the people, not the population, which forms the nation. It is not ascertained in any arithmetical notation, and the political order has not this nominal basis. It is a mechanical conception which assumes a certain normal number as its true condition. Rousseau estimated the normal number for the people at ten thousand, and at peri

1 French and German publicists, the former constantly and the latter mainly, -use these terms, the people and the nation, in this significance. The organic people in its physical condition, as the natural element of the state is called the people (Peuple, naturvolk), in its political condition it is called the nation (Nation, statsvolk). But the terms in German political literature are wide away from any other. Bluntschli adopted the above distinction in his earlier writings, while in his later, against the common use, he has followed the strict derivation of the words.

odic intervals it was to be changed to conform to this census, but it has no more an arbitrary ground in the numbers of statistics than in the formulas of lawyers. It may change with successive generations, and in the prosperity and the adversity of its years. It may exist in "numbers as the stars for multitude," or in only a remnant who keep its calling and guard its ancient faith, and endure through captivities, and at last triumph over every conquest. The national type is not obliterated in the vicissitudes of events, nor overborne by the migrations of races, and does not perish, although the individual die.

The people in its wholeness constitutes the nation, and it is to comprehend in its political aim the purpose, and in its end to realize the destination of the people as an whole. It is not of the one, nor of the many, but of the people. There is no individual, as Louis XIV., who can assume to be the state, and no hereditary class, and no party or section can say, it is in us alone. There is no sect and no faction that can claim it as an exclusive possession. The spirit of a party, or a class or a sect in its isolation, subordinates the state to a special or a private end. Thus when he who comprehends only a party or a class or a sect, -a mere fragment, comes to work upon the whole, not comprehending in his purpose the people as an whole, but only the parts and nothing beyond, his work is that of inevitable weakness and corruption.

The people in its normal and moral relations constitutes the nation. There is no arbitrary principle in which the people can define its existence, as if society had an individual or artificial basis. And it is not simply the physical condition which conforms to a tribal law. It cannot make a physical condition the principle of its being. There is

1" America, though the best representative of the social and political gains of the eighteenth century, was not the parent of the idea, in modern civilization, that man is a constituent member of the state of his birth irrespective of his ancestry. It was become the public law of Christendom. Had America done less, she would have been not the leader but the laggard of nations."— Ban

not among its powers any by which it may elect those who shall be in it, but as the normal and moral condition men. are born and live and act in it. It is not to restrict itself, to those who may be rich or learned. There is no human imperfectness that can be made the ground of exclusion from it, and no human greatness that can justify an exaltation over it. The isolation from it can result only through crime, and this is in the law that crime is in its nature the severance of the relations of a moral order.

The people in its conscious unity, embodies its aim in the nation. Then it apprehends its object in it, and it is set before it in its moral order as the aim of all. It is then reflected in the political spirit of the people, and moulds its character. There is in a mere mass or aggregate, a fragmentary collection of individuals or parties, no ground in which the unity, apparent in political spirit and political character, can subsist.

The people is to work out its own political conception in the nation, after the type of its own individuality. The external circumstance, the limitations and conditions in which it is to act, are as varied as in the development of the individual type in nature, while its life which runs through human cycles, has a wider range than in the sequence of physical nature. The forms through which its spirit is to work, are more manifold than those written in nature's book of infinite secrecy. The life of history is the more opulent in its types; and the forms of the bud and the tree in limitless forests, are not so individual or so diverse as those wrought in the spirit of the people in history. It is to work out its own purpose in a moral world, and in it alone it has the satisfaction of the spirit. It can no more conceive the desire to be another people, than the individual can conceive the desire to be another

croft's History, vol. ix. p. 449. "Der zustand der Barberei besteht darin dass eine menge ein Volk ist ohne zugleich ein Staat zu sein."-Hegel, in Rosekranz Leben, p. 244.

than himself, that is, to lose his own identity. The spirit of the people is thus reflected in, as it is formed in and through, the individual and the generation, while its perfect type is in no single individual and no separate generation, but in the work of the people in its continuity.

The people alone in the nation, constitutes in its integral and moral life the political order. It belongs to none separate from it to prescribe its political course. The people can acknowledge no control beyond its own organic law save only that of God, and the law of its being as a moral person presumes that, as its freedom subsists in that. The power belongs of itself to no individual and no family and no class, separate from the nation, as there is also no individual and no family and no class belonging to the nation that is exempt from its authority.1

The people, in the nation in its moral being, alone has the right of government. It is in the nation only, of divine right. Its power is from God and of the people. Its authority is therefore in the name of God and the people, and the responsibility of those who bear its authority is to God and the people. The government therefore can claim identity with no special and divine majesty, and can assume no special and divine appointment. It is only as representative of the nation that it is clothed with authority.

The right of government is in the will of the people, while it is only in its being in the nation, as a moral person, that the will of the people subsists. Its authority apart from this, has no foundation, and can refer for its postulate only to a fiction; it can be held then only in an arbitrary assumption, and defined only in an abstract and vacant conception. The being of the nation as a moral

1" This authority is not 'the governed,' from whose 'consent' it is so often in a false sense declared 'every government derives its just powers,' but a political people, having the power as sovereign to govern every natural person within a certain territory without reference to his consent." - Mr. Hurd's article on Reconstruction," American Law Review, January, 1867.

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person, is alone the positive and substantial ground, apart from which the will of the people is only formal, and its freedom only the empty sphere of outward circumstance. The will of the people in the nation thus is not comprehended simply in its collective act, nor in its momentary act, and these may not always embody the moral aim, nor represent the continuous purpose of the people. It obtains a clearer expression in the exclusion of the caprice, the whim and willfulness of men, and in the latter there is confusion and not order, the creation of chaos and not the state. The assumption of the caprice of men as the condition of power subverts government, and resolves the state into its atomy.

The will of the people in the being of the nation as a moral person, is the organic political power. It is the only unbroken succession. The ruler who is over and separate from the people, is he whose right is disputed, whose authority is transient, whose succession is subject to accident. The will of the people in its succession in the nation, is not limited to the individual or to the generation, but it is transmitted through the individual and the generations of

men.

The people forming the nation exists in its physical unity and circumstance, in a necessary relation to the land. The land is the outward sphere of the organization of the political people. The people and the land thus, in common language, become a synonym. Greece is a name which represents a certain definite geographical limit, and again the complex political life of a people.

The possession of the land by the people is the condition of its historical life. The land is the field of its work in history. Nomads may form a horde, but not a state. The historical work of the people has an immediate relation to the land in which its fortunes are unfolded.

The right to the land is in the people, and the land is