First and chief, no man makes a question, that the people are the source of all political power.  Government is instituted for their good, and its members are their agents and servants.  He who would argue against this must argue without an adversary.  And who thinks there is any peculiar merit in asserting a doctrine like this, in the midst of twenty millions of people, when nineteen millions nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them hold it, as well as himself?  There is no other doctrine of government here; and no man imputes to another, and no man should claim for himself, any peculiar merit for asserting what everybody knows to be true, and nobody denies.  Why, where else can we look but to the people for political power, in a popular government?  We have no hereditary executive, no hereditary branch of the legislature, no inherited masses of property, no system of entails, no long trusts, no long family settlements, no primogeniture.  Every estate in the country, from the richest to the poorest, is divided among sons and daughters alike.  Alienation is made as easy as possible; everywhere the transmissibility of property is perfectly free.  The whole system is arranged so as to produce, as far as unequal industry and enterprise render it possible, a universal equality among men; an equality of rights absolutely, and an equality of condition, so far as the different characters of individuals will allow such equality to be produced.  He who considers that there may be, is, or ever has been, since the Declaration of Independence, any person who looks to any other source of power in this country than the people, so as to give peculiar merit to those who clamor loudest in its assertion, must be out of his mind, even more than Don Quixote.  His imagination was only perverted.  He saw things not as they were, though what he saw were things.  He saw windmills, and took them to be giants, knights on horseback.  This was bad enough; but whoever says, or speaks as if he thought, that anybody looks to any other source of political power in this country than the people, must have a stronger and wilder imagination, for he sees nothing but the creations of his own fancy.  He stares at phantoms.

Well, then, let all admit, what none deny, that the only source of political power in this country is the people.  Let us admit that they are sovereign, for they are so; that is to say, the aggregate community, the collected will of the people, is sovereign.  I confess that I think Chief Justice Jay spoke rather paradoxically than philosophically, when he said that this country exhibited the extraordinary spectacle of many sovereigns and no subjects.  The people, he said, are all sovereigns; and the peculiarity of the case is that they have no subjects, except a few colored persons.  This must be rather fanciful.  The aggregate community is sovereign, but that is not the sovereignty which acts in the daily exercise