Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume V.Scott, Walter
History
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume V.
Scott, Walter
France -- History -- 1789-1815; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
The objection proposed against the legality of the Senate's acting as
the organ of the people, in pronouncing the doom of forfeiture, rests
upon the idea, that the right of dethroning the sovereign, who shall be
guilty of oppression beyond endurance, can only be exercised in a
peculiar and formal manner, or, as our law-phrase goes, "according to
the statute made and provided in that case." This seems to take a narrow
view of the subject. The right of redressing themselves under such
circumstances, does not belong to, and is not limited by, any peculiar
forms of civil government. It is a right which belongs to human nature
under all systems whatever. It exists in every government under the sun,
from that of the Dey of Algiers to the most free republic that ever was
constructed. There is, indeed, much greater latitude for the exercise of
arbitrary authority in some governments than in others. An Emperor of
Morocco may, with impunity, bathe his hands to the elbows in the blood
of his subjects shed by his own hand; but even in this the most absolute
of despotisms, there are peculiar limits which cannot be passed by the
sovereign without the exercise of the natural right of resistance on the
part of his subjects, although their system of government be as
arbitrary as words can declare it to be, and the Emperor is frequently
dethroned and slain by his own guards.
In limited governments, on the other hand, like that of Great Britain,
the law imposes bounds, beyond which the royal authority shall not pass;
but it makes no provision for what shall take place, should a monarch,
as in the case of James II., transgress the social compact. The
constitution averts its eyes from contemplating such an event--indeed it
is pronounced impossible; and when the emergency did arrive, and its
extrication became a matter of indispensable necessity, it was met and
dealt with as a concurrence of circumstances which had not happened
before, and ought never to be regarded as being possible to occur again.
The foreigner who peruses our constitution for the forms of procedure
competent in such an event as the Revolution, might as well look in a
turnpike act for directions how to proceed in a case resembling that of
Phaeton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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