Page:Review of the Proclamation of President Jackson.djvu/68

 becomes the sovereign, and will continue such as long as it enjoys these rights, no matter by what means they may have been acquired.

The first and highest of these rights of sovereignty, nay, that which comprehends all the others, is the right to create a government to regulate the affairs of all the subjects of the sovereign, and to amend, alter, or abolish this government, at its pleasure. Stripped of this right, sovereignty is but a worthless name: but while this right is retained, although the government created by the sovereign's will may be endowed with the plenary Power of a Roman perpetual Dictator, yet as it lives by by the will of its Creator, it would be idle to call such a government a sovereignty.

When I speak of the right to create new, and abolish former governments, as the sure index and test of sovereignty, I do not, of course, refer to force. That may be, and more often has been, employed to destroy, than to preserve, rights of all kinds.

What I mean to assert is simply this: wherever a power exists in any Country, which power is admitted by all of that Country to possess the right of creating, amending, or abolishing the government of that country, this power must be superior to the government created by itself, and is the true and only sovereign of that country. Alterations of government made by such a power, are not properly termed Revolutions.

They exhibit only a change of will on the part of an acknowledged Sovereign; a mere peaceful repeal of some former ordinance, and the enaction of a new one, designed to attain the same great objects, by different, and, as the Sovereign believes, by better and more appropriate means.—Thus, when the King, Lords, and Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, in virtue of the omnipotence or sovereignty of that body, recently altered the foundations of their government, by a mere Statue, the alteration was well termed a Reform, because those who made the change, it was acknowledged on all hands, had the right to make it. So, too, when the King of France, a few years since, granted to his subjects a new form of government, by a charter wherein was defined their rights and his duties, this was not Revolution, but Reform of another kind only; for he who granted this charter, being an acknowledged Sovereign, had the confessed