The constitution which a nation is said to give itself, is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the state for the government instituted under it.Thomas Paine would admit nothing to be the constitution but a written document which he could fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.The Abbe Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with the constitution itself.
No constitution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment.
What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best, legislative instead of constitutive.The famous Magna Charta drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power.
The constitution is the intrinsic or inherent and actual constitution of the people or political community itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one another.
The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and established in accordance with any preconceived theory.What is theoretic in a constitution is unreal.The constitutions conceived by philosophers in their closets are constitutions only of Utopia or Dreamland.This world is not governed by abstractions, for abstractions are nullities.Only the concrete is real, and only the real or actual has vitality or force.The French people adopted constitution after constitution of the most approved pattern, and amid bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no element of its life.
The English are great constitution-mongers--for other nations.
They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it only an embarrassment or encumbrance.The doctor might as well attempt to give an individual a new constitution, or the constitution of another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other constitution than that which it has, and with which it is born.
The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves this thesis.The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the nations founded on the site of the empire, a double constitution--the barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East.The key to all modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two constitutions and the interests respectively associated with them, which created two societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same national denomination.The barbaric was the constitution of the conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to a very great extent into harmony with itself.The Pope became a feudal sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman constitution got the upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far as it could not be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.The original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its constitution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
