the grantees, constitute a limit upon the authority of the grantor in being irrevocable. Such grants may well be termed compacts between the granting Sovereign and his accepting subjects, solemn agreements which neither party may of right alter, without the consent of the other. So too, in governments of unknown antiquity, according to the theory of whose unwritten law the governors are omnipotent, even if this vast power be derived not from force but from consent, this very consent constitutes a solemn compact.
In this country, however, none of whose governments have been established by force; where the origin of all is the creation of but yesterday, governors can filch no Power, or the governed lose any Right in the gloomy obscurity and uncertainty of antiquity. Here everything is clear as was the light of that blessed day on which was proclaimed the sacred truths, that here the People are the only Sovereign of the People; that here magistrates of all sorts are but the agents and servants of this Sovereign, called into being by its fiat, solely for its own benefit, deriving all their authority from its grants, which grants are revocable at the pleasure of the grantors, because intended solely for their own good. But the idea of a compact, lawfully revocable at the will of one of the parties, would be a legal paradox, not less absurd than the moral absurdity of a compact between a creator and his mere creature formed for the Creator's own use.
It results from all this, that whatever of truth there may be in the theory of the political Philosophers of the old world, which considers government there as a compact between the governors and the governed, no such theory can be true here.
None of our governments can ever be considered as such contracts.
They are mere revocable procurations, simple delegations of limited and temporary authority, executed by the Sovereign People to their attornies, which agents are thereby authorized and required by their constituents, to accomplish certain purposes, by certain defined means, the constituents thereby allowing and confirming whatsoever shall be done by their attornies, under this power, and in pursuance of its authorities, but nothing else.—Here governors can derive no power jure divino, for they are
