on electif'e. royalty.

It seems that elective royalty was the first known form of government. In the small states of Greece and Italy, in those of Arabia and Germany, among all barbarous nations, or those who were making the first steps towards civilization at the origin of society, power has been uniformly seen divided among an elective chief, who had the office of commanding the nation in war, and of being its judge in peace; a council of old men, or men acknowledged as superiors, to second him; and an assembly of the people who in their turn gave advice before they obeyed. Absolute power is not an idea natural to man; it is always by some accident that it has been established, and in almost every dynasty it may be shown where it has begun. All small nations have at first seen in their chiefs, what they were in fact, the first servants of the state: they chose them for their own advantage, and supposing that they might afterwards find that there would be more stability by renouncing their free choice and trusting to the chances of heirship, it was at least not a combination which could present itself to their minds from the first. There is, perhaps, not one hereditary monarchy which has not been elective.

In the same way elective monarchy has preceded a republic as being a more simple combination. In the infancy of society, a state of war is, in some sort, the habitual state; and in war the superiority of a chief over a council is so evident for secrecy in discussion, for promptitude in decision, for the influence of example, for enthusiasm, much better excited by a man than by an abstract idea, that there is scarcely an example of the command of an army being given to the collected wills of several men. To choose a king is to choose at the same time a general and a judge; in no other respect did barbarous nations think they had any need of government. On the contrary, to choose an executive council was to oblige this council afterwards to delegate the functions of generalship to a man, who perhaps would not be always disposed to obey.

But elective kings often wished to seize on all power, and to transmit it by inheritance to their families. When they succesded, they founded-hereditary monarchies; when they failed, they had inspired so much distrust that royalty was abolished, the power which had been intrusted to them was divided, its duration was limited, and assemblies of the first men (colleges), were substituted for individuals.

Thus the primitive form of government was abolished almost everywhere; only those nations which have remained in a state approaching barbarism have preserved the too simple organization of an elective king, sharing the sovereignty with a council of old men and an assembly of all the citizens. The motives which caused it to be adopted no longer subsist among civilized nations and in modern times; war is no longer in the power of small nations; they require from their magistrates more prudence than bravery: thus they entrust their destinies to a senate rather than to a general. This primitive form, so distant from us and so little known, does not seem to deserve any further attention.

We need not, perhaps, give much more to the small elective monarchies belonging to ecclesiastics, which have been preserved to our times in so great a number in Germany, and all which we have seen destroyed; whilst the pontifical sovereign at Rome exists on the same basis, as a specimen of a social order scarcely credible, if we did not see it exist. How is it possible to conceive, in fact, that to form a statesman, a legislator, an administrator, a warrior, to obtain the union of all these qualities, not less necessary to a bishop-prince than to any other prince, of those qualities which ought alone to deserve the confidence of nations, of all that knowledge which makes the science of government more difficult, and at the same time more noble, than all other human sciences, it should be required from him who in his old age is to end by being a monarch, that he should in his youth abjure the world and all commerce with men; that he should renounce active life; that he should abhor, above all things, the trade of arms, and that he should consecrate all his time, all his energy, all his faculties, to a study which has not the least relation to the functions which he will have to fulfil; that after this education has been given to all the aspirants, the choice of the monarch should be confided to men as completely ignorant as himself of all affairs of government, that his council should be formed of those who, like himself, have abjured the world, and that even to the lowest of those employed in his administration, the fundamental condition of being in their places should be that they are not suited to such a situation?

This character of the elections in sovereign prelacies cannot be applied without some exceptions to the papacy: the importance of the dominion over conscience throughout Christendom has called statesmen to the government of the church. Popes and called cardinals were not recluses, nor men who had renounced worldly policy; and, in fact, the court of Rome has shown in a certain line an address and an energy, which perhaps no other court has equalled. However, the talent which it is most requisite for nations to find in their chiefs, is that of administration; and among all the popes, distinguished by their character or their genius, there has not been one single good administrator.

It seems as if the election of a prince-bishop should be considered as the last term of political absurdity; however accustomed we may be to find the people reckoned for nothing in the constitution, these governments seem more openly than any other to announce that they were instituted for the advantage of the prince, and not for that of his subjects. This is not all, however; there were monk-princes, princes of religious orders. In Germany, alone, were reckoned four sovereign archbishops, twenty-one bishops, twenty-nine abbots or priors, and fifteen abbesses; besides a grand master of the Teutonic order; in all, seventy elective royalties reserved to the members of the church.

These governments have all been suppressed in our times; but, what is well worthy of remark, they have all been regretted. The conditions of the election were such, that one would not have chosen for the lowest employment, a carpenter or a mason, in the way a prince was chosen; it was sufficient, however, that there was an election, to secure some kind of constitution. At each new reign, the contract between the prince and the people was renewed; the old creatures of power were changed; some ancient abuses were abolished, some new securities were often demanded. In short, as family interests were not opposed to national interests, there was found, in every age, some prince-abbot, some prince-bishop, who did not feel that instinctive hatred of liberty so common among the powerful; who consented to illustrate his reign by some useful institution, destined to last for ever, whilst he was himself only a sojourner on earth. If he feared a contest with his contemporaries, he did not, on that account, refuse to lay the foundations of rights for generations to come. Thus misers are often generous in their wills, at the expense of their heirs.

Ecclesiastical principalities had existed, as an appendage to the feudal system, in other places besides Germany; and in other places also, the right of electing the prince, however ill exercised, had been a beginning of liberty. The residence of more than one prince-bishop had become a republic. The first enfranchised municipalities in France, those of Rheims, of Laon, of Mons, were held under an ecclesiastical lord. The prince-bishops of Lausanne, of Geneva, of Basle, the prince-abbot of St. Gall, allowed Swiss liberty to spring up among them; the archbishops of Lyons and Arles, the bishops of Avignon and Marseilles, who, in the ancient kingdom of Arles, were in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries elective sovereigns, allowed under their eyes the republican independence of these four cities to become established. The republics of Bologna, of Perugia, of Ancona, were seen to flourish under the government of the Pope: even now if the pontifical government does not sufficiently provide for social order, it does not at least adopt the system of oppression of an hereditary despotism.

The state of servitude to which Europe was reduced before the establishment of the feudal system, could alone permit the institution of sacerdotal government; we cannot believe that such circumstances will occur again; and especially that nations, who can choose their government, will seek for models in those pious foundations of the middle ages. It was worth while, however, to remark what have been the effects of elective principalities, in states where some kind of right of election was the only popular liberty.

Europe, also, has tried elective royalty in some large and civilized states, and until a period not very distant from our times. Venice, with the title of republic, was an elective constitutional monarchy, where the power of the Doge was limited by that of the aristocracy alone: Venice, for a time at least, took rank among the most powerful states of Europe; and the succession of about a hundred and twenty elective monarchs caused neither troubles, nor civil wars, nor any of those inconveniences which are said to be necessarily attached to this form of government.

The defence of Christendom against Turks and Pagans was entrusted during the best half of the middle ages to the two elective monarchies of Hungary and Poland. In both these countries the people were slaves; but the king divided the sovereignty with a numerous equestrian order, warlike, and idolizing their liberty. The electoral right raised to the throne, in both these kingdoms, some of the greatest princes who have ever governed any nation; and perhaps Europe owes even her existence to this constitution, now so decried, which gave a defender to the west in John Sobieski. Elective royalty cannot however be appreciated, either in Hungary, where the hereditary attachment to certain families raised to the throne minors and females; or in Poland, where the most anarchical of all institutions, the liberum veto, annihilated all possibility of government, and delivered up the republic by turns to every local usurpation, and every foreign influence.

But the first, in rank and in extent, of the monarchies of Europe, has also been elective by right, till our times, and in fact till the sixteenth century. We might be astonished that whilst Germany, Italy, and part of France were subject to an elective crown, no one has ventured to show the advantages of this government, in opposition to that of hereditary government, if we did not know that the emperor, always desirous of transmitting his crown to his children, and habitually in a state of conspiracy against the constitution in the name of which he reigned, would have looked with much dislike on any apology for the government of his country; and that all the German princes, wishing to preserve to themselves the right of electing their chief, never thought of granting to their subjects the right of electing their lords.

The silence of those who ought to have defended elective royalty, and the noisy vindications of the champions of hereditary monarchy, have established as a principle, generally admitted by all publicists, that a nation cannot reserve to itself the election of its kings without exposing itself on every interregnum to the intrigues of its neighbours, the quarrels of the different parties, to prolonged troubles, and to civil wars. To appreciate this opinion, it will not be unseasonable to compare royalty in France and Germany. The two monarchies sprung from the division of the empire of Charlemagne; their organization was then nearly the same; their power was almost equal; but the Germanic Carlovingian race being extinct, and afterwards the house of Saxony by the death of Otho the Third in 1002, the crown became purely elective in Germany; whilst Hugh Capet, having caused himself to be elected in France, transmitted to his son Robert, by right of inheritance in 996, a crown which from that time remained hereditary. From the year 1000 to the year 1520, when the Germanic empire-—-thanks to the preponderance of Charles the Fifth-— appeared to have devolved on the house of Austria, the two great states of Europe may justly be regarded as having experienced, in nearly equal circumstances, the two opposite systems.

The empire had during this space of time twenty-five chiefs, among whom twelve or thirteen are incontestably rantked among great men. This period of time was marked by a constant progress in Germany and Italy towards liberty, public prosperity, and intelligence: at the end of this period, the monarchy was more united, and more vigorous, than it was at its commencement; but during this time it had several times appeared to be on the point of being dissolved. However, the almost condnual contest of the church against the empire was a source of troubles, independent of the elective or hereditary form of government. Of the twenty-five elections which gave heads to the empire, eleven were contested, and were followed by civil wars The church, eager to limit the imperial power, had been a party in all these ware. It was almost always the popes exited discord among the electors, or called upon the pope s who up arms. These wars, though frequent, were short; their duration added together, filled only a period of forty-three years: it must be remarked also, that we reckon as a time of war all that in which one of the two rivals, after his defeat, having retired into his hereditary states, continued to take a title which he could not get acknowledged except in his own country. We have not on the other side comprised in it the long interregnum from 1257 to 1273, because tile two rivals, Richard of Cornwall, and Alphonso of Castile, fixing their abode in England, and in Spain, did not occasion bloodshed on the soil of the empire on account of their double election.

During the same space of time France had twenty-three kings; her progress during these reigns is very inferior to that of Germany; none of her cities equalled in commerce and industry, in riches and population, the imperial and Hanseatic cities of Germany, still less the Italian republics; the people in the country were more enslaved and poor; and whilst the lower class in Germany, the landsknechts, had gained a high military reputation, those of France were unarmed, and her kings were obliged to call in foreign infantry for their armies.

The right of the kings of France to their crown was contested by Edward the Third and his grandson Richard the Second, kings of England, who pretended to be called to the throne of France by the laws of inheritance; and again by Henry the Fifth and by Henry the Sixth. If these pretensions were sometimes abandoned by other English kings, it was not because the order of succession was cleared up, but domestic disturbances or minorities prevented their supporting what they called their rights. Adding up the wars with the English for the succession to the crown of France, independently of those excited by other motives, we find that during this period they lasted sixty-three years. In fact, wars for succession are more rare than those for election, but they are much more bloody, much longer, and more ruinous.

We may strictly also reckon as a consequence of the hereditary system, the wars in which the kingdom was engaged to support the succession to other crowns claimed by the kings of France. Twenty-six years of this period were filled by the wars for the successions of Naples and Milan, which began in 1494, and were prolonged far beyond the epoch at which we stop. The wars for the successions to the duchies and lordships of France, reannexed to the crown, alone filled centuries.

Whilst election almost always raises to the throne a man gifted with some talents, or at least of an age to conduct himself, hereditary monarchies must submit to the chances of humanity. We will refrain from examining what was the character of the French sovereigns during this period; we will only remark that the chances of inheritance placed on the throne Charles the Sixth, who was mad for thirty years (1892—1421) and whose madness had the most fatal consequences for the nations subject to him.

Madness is a rare accident; minority is a necessary consequence of the system of inheritance to the crown. During these same 520 years, which form the object of our comparison, France was governed ninety-two years by sovereigns who were under the age of twenty-five, the legal age in this country, and at this epoch, for individuals to take the administration of their own affairs. She was governed fifty-six years by sovereigns who had not attained the age of twenty-one.

Now, the regency of a monarchy, during a mluority, is perhaps the worst possible form of government. It is a republic, for the sovereign pswer is divided between councils and individuals who are intended to balance one another; but it is a republic without republican habits, where the duties are not entrusted either to popularity, or celebrity, or virtue; where foreign females and often enemies are admitted to a command from which the law excludes princesses of the national blood. Among the regents of this period have been placed very high, Blanche of Castile, very low, Isabella of Bavaria, perhaps with as little reason for one as the other.

It is not, then, the wars caused by the elections which must be regarded as establishing the disadvantage of elective royalty, compared to hereditary royalty, since the succession wars have in general lasted still longer, and minorities are more to be feared for nations than interregnums. The example which we have chosen, is not the most favourable to the elective system. We shall scarcely find thirteen years of wars caused by the elections, in all the history of Poland, and ten years in all that of Hungary, though in neither of these countries did the constitution seem suited to avoid these disturbances. As to Germany, when the imperial election was entrusted to seven powerful princes, it seemed from the armies which each of them always kept ready, as if they wished beforehand to organize civil war. It might be expected that in modem times, since rights have been better defined, and genealogies better known, successions to the crown would be more rarely contested; it is not so; questions of succession have arisen on all sides, many perhaps arc still dormant, waiting for future wars; for it is the essence of the law of royal succession to be unchangeable and imprescriptible; therefore, whenever it has been misunderstood or altered by legislative authority, or violated by adoptions, legitimation, testamentary dispositions, and renunciations, all those who have been despoiled think they preserve to the end of time the right to reclaim it. In fact, the doubtful cases, which mnst be governed by the law of royalty, only present themselves at long intervals of time; the reigning prince is then always interested in changing the law, and getting this change sanctioned by popular consent. If his right to do so were acknowledged, the law would only last till it had nothing to regulata France would no longer know the Salic law, if kings, united with states-general, had been able to change it, as they attempted to do in 1420, in order to expel Charles the Seventh, and in 1588, to exclude Henry the Fourth. Females were not less expressly excluded from the succession in Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria; and the succession of the house of Lorraine to that of Hapsburgh remains an usurpation in the eyes of the partisans of legitimacy, notwithstanding the cry of the diet of Hungary, Moriamur pro regenostro Maria Theresa In Spain, Philip the Fifth had no more the right to introduce the Salic law, than any of his successors had to abolish it. Isabella the Second reigns in virtue of the ancient law of the country, which Don Carlos wished to annihilate. In Portugal the fundamental law excludes all foreigners. Don Mignel made a strange application of it to the sovereign of a detached portion of the empire; but this sophism sufficed to produce a eivi] war. Even in France, the Duchess d'Angoulême ought to have succeeded to the crown of Navarre, where females are admitted; and this crown would have been detached from that of France, as it was in a similar case in 1328, to pass to the daughter of Louis the Tenth. In Piedmont, at the accession of the present king, Sardinia and Montferrat, which are feminine fiefs, ought to have gone to the daughter of his predecessor, and to have been detached from Savoy and Piedmont, which are masculine fiefs. The duchy of Modena, a masculine fief, should have gone to an agnate of the house Guelfo-Estense, either to the Duke of Brunswick, or to the King of England, rather than to the actual sovereign, who has succeeded in the name of a female. There would be no end of enumerating all the quarrels about succession, which might in our time cause an appeal to arms. A mode of election which would exclude foreign intrigues and domestic factions, would probably not be more difficult to invent for elective royalty than for the presidentships of the different states of America.

At all evenm, we must confess that it is only a rude kind of constitution which entrusts so much power to the head of a gocerement, and identifies his interests so little with those of the state. The name of king excites, and will always excite, the desire for royalty in the elected chiefs. They will take the measure of their prerogatives from those of the most powerful and most absolute monarchies; they will always look upon every limit to the accomplishment of their will as an injustice, and they will be in a state of habitual conspiracy against the constitution of the kingdom, in order to make a dignity here ditary which has only been entrusted to them for their lives. They will even have for the subversion of the laws, an advantage which hereditary monarchs have not; that is to say, greater activity, a greater personal reputation, and a more immediate participation in affairs.

In hereditary monarchies, with an infinitely small number of exceptions, the king is only a great national elector, who names his mluisters and his council, and who afterwards lays on them the whole burden of administration. In constitutional monarchies, this limitation of the personal activity of the king not only exists, but is of right; it is established by the law. It is understood that even the speeches of the king are composed by his mluisters; that all acts done in the name of the king are suggested by these same ministers, who make themselves responsible for them: and that in England they obstinately resist the least suggestion, the least recommendation, that comes from the person of the king. In absolute monarchies, the kings do not any more reign themselves. All the power of the state is always in the hands of a council, of a cabinet, which renews itself by intrigues little known, divides all the functions, and commands him whom it appears to obey. All the sovereignty is always lodged in a strict oligarchy, only these oligarchies are not appointed either for their birth, or for their wealth, or for their celebrity, but by the intrigues of courtiers, if not even by corruption and vice. Some absolute monarchs neglect the business of the state for their pleasures; others regularly meet the councils, but are too timid to endeavour to make their opinion prevail over that of men whom they think better informed; others, in short, fancy they govern because they give many orders, which their favourites, their mistresses, or their confessors, have secretly suggested. The power belongs sometimes to public counsellors, sometimes to hidden ones; but except Frederick the Great, and perhaps the czar Peter, there is scarcely to be found one example of-an hereditary sovereign, who was himself the soul of his government.

It is quite otherwise in elective monarchies, or under the founders of hereditary monarchies, who are themselves only elective kings. They must have given proof of aptitude in business, of activity of talent, of bravery, to arrive at the rank which they occupy. It is the man himself that has been chosen, not the family; it is the man who is formed to be the general, the administrator, the president of diets, the orator of the government. We have seen what Napoleon was in France; no mode of election, it is true, would easily find his equal. Without doubt, the greater part of the kings of Poland, most of the emperors of Germany, scarcely resembled him; but they had this relation to him, like him they were the soul of the government; their ministers were only their secretaries, and it was the kings alone who gave the impulse instead of receiving it. Those who prefer monarchical government, because they like better to obey a man than a council, or according to a popolar expression, they would rather have one king than a hundred, ought to be satisfied only with an elective monarchy, for it is there alone that the individual reigns.

But how much more power will a king, who has himself exercised all the functions with which the law entrusts him, have to overthrow the constitution, than a king of England! He has not only chosen his ministers, he has appointed also, from his own personal knowledge, all the different agents of power, even to those nearest the people; it has always been his piercing eye which has distinguished merit, which has advanced it, but at the same time has enchained it to himself. He has prepared in his cabinet the laws submitted to the legislature; he conceives of them as a whole, and be sees at one glance all the measures which will only he presented in a detached form, to those who are to decide on them. He knows his own projects, and he compares the future, of which he is the sole master, with the present, beyond which his oounsellors see nothing. The army is his, for he has commanded it in war, saved it in danger, made it illustrious by victory; still more, because he has formed it, by appointing all its officers, not by the often degrading favour of courts; not after the immoveabte rules of age, which often place the most incapable in the first ranks, but from that merit which he has himself distinguished on the field of battle. Among the best citizens there are a great number who would rather trust to him than to national councils. Nor are these councils exempt from deceptive passions; representing the national mind, they can scarcely raise themselves above mediocrity, whilst genius is found in the great man whom the nation has chosen. Whenever his projects have been brought into opposition with common men, experience has taught them that his coup d'œil was more prompt and more just; his views more profound, and that he acted as if he already foresaw that future which others only recognise when long years are passed. But how great is their error, if this confidence given to genius leads them to second the projects of the chosen of the people, against the constitution of his country. It is because they look upon him as the only man, that they obey him, and the result of their obedience will be, that his like will never again be at the head of the state. It is because they love heroes, that they give up the power of choosing them, and condemn themselves to have only children of a great man, and children whom a proverb has declared degenerate and incapable of go. verning.

In fact, it is the singular consequence of elective monarchy, that the better have been its results, the nearer it has been to its ruin. Whenever a great man has been raised to the throne of the Empire, of Poland, of Hungary, he has taken advantage of a brilliant reign, of the lustre with which he has encompassed the nation, of the prosperity which he has been the cause of its enjoying, to change the constitution, to fix the crown in his own family, to leave the inheritance of a hero to an unworthy son. When, on the contrary, his talent was less brilliant, his popularity less seductive, the elective monarch has always taken advantage of his power to enrich and aggrandize his family at the expense of the crown, thus to change in a different way the constitution of the state. In the empire, monarchs have given to their sons the great fiefs which fall to the crown. Rodolph of Hapsburg disposed thus of Austria; Henry the Seventh, of Bohemia: in Hungary, the palatinates, in Poland, the starosties, which ought to have supported the lustre of the crown, were usurped by the children of the kings. The celibacy of ecclesiastical sovereigns has not secured their elective monarchies from this abuse; and the nepotism of Rome seems to be an evll inherent in this form of government.

Must we then renounce the signal advantages which seem attached to the concentration of executive power in the hands of one person; the vigour, the compactness, the instinctive knowledge of men, the presence of the head of the government under its banners? Must the country be deprived of those gigantic developments which genius obtains for her, when it is at the head of the state? We propose to examine in another article, the first of those expedients to which recourse has been had to reconcile the power of the favourite of the nation with the institutions and rights, whose duration it is the great object to preserve: it is temporary monarchy, or presidentship. We shall afterwards examine the expediency of the opposite system, that of fixed power, made so much the more uniform, as all extraordinary men are excluded from it: it is hereditary monarchy in all its different modifications.