those offices which it is its object only to methodize and reconcile.  Duties, at their extreme bounds, are drawn very fine, so as to become almost evanescent.  In that state some shade of doubt will always rest on these questions, when they are pursued with great subtilty.  But the very habit of stating these extreme cases is not very laudable or safe; because, in general, it is not right to turn our duties into doubts.  They are imposed to govern our conduct, not to exercise our ingenuity; and therefore our opinions about them ought not to be in a state of fluctuation, but steady, sure, and resolved.

Amongst these nice, and therefore dangerous points of casuistry, may be reckoned the question so much agitated in the present hour,—­Whether, after the people have discharged themselves of their original power by an habitual delegation, no occasion can possibly occur which may justify the resumption of it?  This question, in this latitude, is very hard to affirm or deny:  but I am satisfied that no occasion can justify such a resumption, which would not equally authorize a dispensation with any other moral duty, perhaps with all of them together.  However, if in general it be not easy to determine concerning the lawfulness of such devious proceedings, which must be ever on the edge of crimes, it is far from difficult to foresee the perilous consequences of the resuscitation of such a power in the people.  The practical consequences of any political tenet go a great way in deciding upon its value.  Political problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood.  They relate to good or evil.  What in the result is likely to produce evil is politically false; that which is productive of good, politically true.

Believing it, therefore, a question at least arduous in the theory, and in the practice very critical, it would become us to ascertain as well as we can what form it is that our incantations are about to call up from darkness and the sleep of ages.  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 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.