ondary and vicarious. They are agencies, and to suppose them possessed of sovereign powers, is to make those powers alienable beyond redemption, which is opposed to the true conception of sovereignty. It is rather the people of the United States, who, having created, may be presumed competent to alter or abolish, their government, that is the true sovereign.

So much for the inferences to be drawn from the definition of sovereignty.

§ 28. Let us now subject the three political bodies or entities specified to a rigid scrutiny, to see if in either of them there can be discovered the distinguishing marks of sovereignty above described.

"If a determinate human superior," says Mr. Austin,1 "not in a habit of obedience to a like superior, receive habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that society."

What political body, institution, or entity is there, in the United States, not in a habit of obedience to any other body, etc., which receives habitual obedience from the bulk of the Union, but the people of the United States? It certainly is not the States, for they have habitually obeyed, each and all of them, the people of the United States ever since the latter entered into a union as one people.2 The people of the United States, in 1789, threw the existing Constitutions of the several States into hotchpotch, and repartitioned amongst those bodies the powers they were thenceforth to exercise, giving a portion thereof to the States, a portion to the general government, and reserving the residue to themselves. And the States have habitually conformed to the edict which thus curtailed and ascertained their powers.

Not only this: the States, since the foundation of the Union, have not received "habitual obedience from the bulk" of the Union; certainly not, severally considered; for while the respective States have received habitual obedience, each from the bulk of its own people, they have not received it severally from the peoples of the other States; that is, the State of Virginia has

1 See ante, § 19.

2 The word habitually is inserted by Mr. Austin in this test of sovereignty to cover the very case lately presented by the United States; that is, the case in which a part of the society should be for a time in revolt against the sovereign whole. It is the general habit of all the parts to obey; that is, to determine where the sovereignty resides.

received habitual obedience from the bulk of the Virginians, but not from that of the people of the whole Union.

If it be urged that the States collectively have received obedience from the bulk of the Union, and therefore fulfil the conditions necessary to make them sovereign organizations, the reply is, that the term "States" is ambiguous, meaning either the citizens of the United States, comprised within the State lines respectively, or the governments established by them within the same lines. In the latter sense, it is not true that the States, considered either severally or collectively, have ever received obedience from the bulk of the society forming the Union. The State governments have no extra-territorial operation, and, of course, receive no extra-territorial obedience. In the former sense, by the "States," collectively considered, would be meant the entire people of the United States, and the hypothesis in question would attribute sovereignty to that people, acting in groups by States-a view of the subject whose correctness I shall have occasion to examine when I come to consider how sovereignty exists in the people of the United States. For the present, I shall only observe, that if the case last supposed were conceded to express the real fact, it would not make the States, as such, sovereign, either individually or collectively, but the people of the United States, acting in a particular way or under particular conditions, as in groups, discriminated from each other by State boundaries.

§ 29. Tested by the concluding mark above described,1 the result is the same.

Whenever, it was said, there exist, within the same territorial limits, two political organizations so related to each other that one may determine its own powers and, in so doing, limit, enlarge, or abolish those of the other, being itself at the same time not only subject to no reciprocal modification, but independent of all the world, the former is a sovereign organization, and the latter is not.

Seeking amongst the political entities of the United States one which answers to these conditions, it is plain that no one of them does so, unless it be the people of the United States. Neither the government of the United States, nor the people nor government of the several States, answers either of those conditions, being each of them subject to the modifying influence of a

1 Ante, § 20.

power underlying them all, from which they received either their origin or those structural changes by which their present form and scope were determined. That underlying power is the people of the United States. To attribute sovereignty to the former, therefore, would be an abuse of terms.

On the other hand, the conditions of sovereignty required are all fulfilled by the people of the United States. Neither their powers nor their modes of administration are determined by the States, severally considered, whether as peoples or governments, nor by the government of the Union, but by themselves alone in some mode selected by themselves. It rests with them, moreover, to remodel or to abolish the governments both of the States and of the Union, and, if they choose, to wipe out the States themselves as political organizations. Under what conditions this may be done, will be the subject of future consideration. For my present purpose, it is enough that the thing may be done under some conditions. This fact alone indicates that the people of the United States are the only sovereign. If it turn out, as it will, that the conditions prescribed under which alone they can do this, are prescribed by themselves, and, therefore, are enforcible only by moral sanctions, that they are the sovereign will become perfectly certain.

§ 30. (b). I pass now to consider briefly a few historical facts and principles tending to determine the mooted question of American nationality, with a view to furnishing other and perhaps more solid grounds of inference as to the locus of sovereignty in the United States. For, if the latter, as a political society, constitute a NATION, there is an end of all question,— the sovereignty dwells in the people of the United States, considered as a body politic and corporate.2

Do the United States, then, constitute a Nation?

Before attempting to answer this question, let us determine what it is, and what it is not, to be a nation.

A nation is defined to be "a race of men; a people born 3 in

1 For a more complete exhibition of this relation of the people of the United States to the people and government of the States respectively, see post, §§ 58

and 62.

2 "Now, an independent nation is, ex vi termini, a sovereign."— Grimke, arguendo, 2 Hill's S. C. Rep. 58. Vattel, bk. 1, ch. 1, sec. 12. 3 "Nascor," "natus," "natio," to be born.

the same country, and living under the same government; a people distinct from others." 1

In this definition is evidently involved the idea of descent from a common stock. This, though substantially correct, would exclude those cases in which different races are mingled in a lasting political union; as when, to a central stock, there are accreted foreign elements by adoption.

A nation, then, in its largest sense, is analogous to, but not identical with, the family. It is a distinct, independent people ; consisting of men of one blood, with such accretions from alien races as, resulting from common affinities, are destined to be permanent; occupying a determinate territory, within whose limits it maintains its own forms of social organization; possessing the same language, laws, religion, and civilization, the same political principles and traditions, the same general interests, attachments, and antipathies; in short, a people bound together, by common attractions and repulsions, into a living organism, possessed of a common pulse, a common intelligence and aspirations, and destined apparently to have a common history and a common fate.

So far of the affirmative definition of a nation.

§ 31. The negative may be given in equally few words.

1. To be a nation is not to be, literally, of one blood or race, but, as we have seen, to be mainly of one blood or race, but with permanent accretions from other races, undergoing, consciously or otherwise, the process of assimilation to the prevailing type.

2. To be a nation, it is not necessary that all its constituent members should be continuously, and under all circumstances, willing or even acquiescent participators in the common national life. Civil wars and dissensions, though facts tending to disprove the existence of nationality in a particular case, are far from decisive of that question, being as inconclusive evidence of its non-existence as a strong and enduring friendship between two contiguous nations would be that they constituted but a single nation. Wars arise as often, perhaps, between factions of the same blood and race, impelled by political animosity or ambition, but confessedly forming a single nation, as between parties of diverse descent, scrambling for ascendency in a con1 Worcester's Dictionary, in verb.

federation, possessing no distinctive national features. If civil commotions, however extensive, were proof that a people did not constitute a nation, what nation has ever existed?

§ 32. Proceeding, now, in the light of these definitions, it may be inferred that the United States constitute a nation,

1. From the fact that, in their development from sparse settlements into a compact and powerful state-e pluribus unumthere is observable a perfect conformity to the method of nature in the genesis of nations.

Let us see what that method is :

Nations do not spring into life, in full bloom of population, wealth, and culture. They are developed from rude beginnings, by a process of assimilation and growth analogous to that in organic life. In their origin, they commonly form a chaos of heterogeneous materials. These, Nature subjects to her kindly influences of warmth and pressure, till they assume a character homogeneous, and, because formed under new conditions, distinctive.

There are two modes in which the diversified materials that ultimately fuse into nations are brought into the contact necessary to a vital union. They may be superimposed, like geological strata; as, where a race comes in by conquest over another, whose polity it subverts, and which it keeps beneath itself as subjects or vassals; or those materials, being dropped apart, like chance seeds, in a wide territory, may take root and spread, each from its little centre, and come in turn to press upon each other laterally.

Whichever of these modes obtains, the constant phenomena are at first estrangements, swelling into wars by reason of collisions of interests, or differences of character and habit. Time, however, kneads the colliding elements gradually into consistency. From being like, they soon come to like, each other. Perhaps the process by which their fusion is completed is, that they suffer some common affliction, or wage together some great war, in which every drop of blood cements them into a firmer union.

§ 33. Of the first mode, most European nations furnish examples. From the earliest historical dates have been witnessed in them wave after wave of conquering races rolling from the east and north, and dashing one upon the other as they went west