A number
of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people
is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial, and made, like
all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular
nature of that agreement was is collected from the form into which the
particular society has been cast. Any other is not _their_ covenant.
When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which
gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a
people,--they have no longer a corporate existence,--they have no longer
a legal coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized
abroad. They are a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more.
With them all is to begin again. Alas! they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which
has a true politic personality.
We hear much, from men who have not acquired their hardiness of
assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence
of a _majority_, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath
taken place in France.
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