In
England Parliament, by means of a steady encroachment on the royal
prerogatives, has gradually become Sovereign; but other countries, such
as France and the United States, which have wholly dispensed with
royalty, cannot, even if they would, make a legislative body Sovereign
by the simple process of allowing it to usurp power once enjoyed by the
Crown. France did, indeed, after it had finally dispensed with
Legitimacy, make two attempts to found governments in which the theory
of popular Sovereignty was evaded. The Orleans monarchy, for instance,
through the mouths of its friends, denied Sovereignty to the people,
without being able to claim it for the King; and this insecurity of its
legal framework was an indirect cause of a violent explosion of
effective popular Sovereignty in 1848. The apologists for the Second
Empire admitted the theory of a Sovereign people, but claimed that the
Sovereign power could be safely and efficiently used only in case it
were delegated to one Napoleon III--a view the correctness of which the
results of the Imperial policy eventually tended to damage.
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