284 POLITICS 



had figured multitudinously in France between the Bourbon of 

 1789 and the Bourbon of 1815. 



Moreover, the content as well as the history of the written consti- 

 tution made it an object of abhorrence to ultra-conservatism. Two 

 features were generally insisted upon as indispensable: first, a dis- 

 tinct enumeration of the rights of the individual with which govern- 

 ment was under no circumstances to interfere; second, a description 

 of the organs of government and a body of rules determining their 

 actual operation. The individual rights normally secured were 

 those that had come to be known as natural rights, and the organs 

 of government with which the practice of written constitutions was 

 associated included some form of popular representative assembly. 

 But both natural rights and popular representation were, of course, 

 diametrically opposed to the ideas of the old regime, and, furthermore, 

 the most fundamental conception of the nature of state and govern- 

 ment that underlay the theory of a written constitution was unac- 

 ceptable to conservatives of every shade. For to the liberals the 

 constitution was the expression of the people's will, and had no 

 more of permanence or immutability than that will. As Rousseau 

 had demanded on principle, and as several of the American states 

 had undertaken in practice, the people must assemble in convention 

 at not infrequent intervals to declare whether they would longer 

 maintain the existing system. State and government, in other words, 

 were mere creations of the will of certain groups of individuals, and 

 a constitution was merely the formal expression of that will at any 

 given time. 



Upon this view of political fundamentals conservatives of every 

 shade made aggressive war. The high priests of autocracy saw only 

 horrid sacrilege in any meddling by the common people with the 

 divine mystery of the state. To suppose that any written phrases, 

 open to the interpretation of the vulgar, could express the essen- 

 tials in political life was to the obscurantists and mystics supreme 

 foolishness. No constitution, declared Joseph de Maistre, the 

 most brilliant exponent of this view, results from deliberation. In 

 every constitution there is something that cannot possibly be written 

 that must be left in venerable obscurity under penalty of destroy- 

 ing the state. The more there is that is written, the feebler is the 

 political structure. When a nation begins to reflect upon itself, its 

 laws and its life are already determined. Sovereignty is an emana- 

 tion from God himself, and man must not tamper with it. 



Something of the spirit of these phrases of de Maistre appears also 

 in the thought of the scientific and the historical schools of conserva- 

 tism. To the theory that the state is made, they oppose Topsy's 

 idea, that it merely grows. Burke's glowing denunciation of the 

 French Revolution gives the keynote of their cry. Men are in the 



