When the supreme authority of the people is in question, before we
attempt to extend or to confine it, we ought to fix in our minds, with
some degree of distinctness, an idea of what it is we mean when we say
the PEOPLE.
In a state of RUDE nature there is no such thing as a people. 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 recognised 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 hardness 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. But amongst men so disbanded, there can be no such
thing as majority or minority; or power in any one person to bind
another. The power of acting by a majority, which the gentlemen
theorists seem to assume so readily, after they have violated the
contract out of which it has arisen (if at all it existed), must be
grounded on two assumptions; first, that of an incorporation produced by
unanimity; and, secondly, an unanimous agreement, that the act of a mere
majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of
the whole.
We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider
this idea of the decision of a MAJORITY as if it were a law of our
original nature; but such constructive whole, residing in a part only,
is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been
or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out
of civil society nature knows nothing of it; nor are men, even when
arranged according to civil order, otherwise than by very long training,
brought at all to submit to it. The mind is brought far more easily
to acquiesce in the proceedings of one man, or a few, who act under
a general procuration for the state, than in the vote of a victorious
majority in councils, in which every man has his share in the
deliberation. For there the beaten party are exasperated and soured by
the previous contention, and mortified by the conclusive defeat. This
mode of decision, where wills may be so nearly equal, where, according
to circumstances, the smaller number may be the stronger force, and
where apparent reason may be all upon one side, and on the other little
else than impetuous appetite; all this must be the result of a very
particular and special convention, confirmed afterwards by long habits
of obedience, by a sort of discipline in society, and by a strong
hand, vested with stationary, permanent power, to enforce this sort
of constructive general will. What organ it is that shall declare the
corporate mind is so much a matter of positive arrangement, that several
states, for the validity of several of their acts, have required a
proportion of voices much greater than that of a mere majority. These
proportions are so entirely governed by convention, that in some cases
the minority decides.