Power Is Not a Family Heirloom

The story presented is simple in form and weighty in implication. A senator has served more than thirty years in the legislature of the United States, becoming a prominent voice in questions of war and peace, and later aligning himself closely with a powerful executive. Upon his departure, the governor of his state announces that a new senator will be appointed, and this newly designated officer declares herself ready to continue the work of her brother. Here are the bare facts: a long tenure, deep influence, and a familial succession by appointment. Many will see in this only continuity and experience. I see, first and last, a question of trust.

When I wrote the "Second Treatise of Government," I defined political power as a right of making laws, with penalties of death and lesser penalties, only for the public good, and by consent of the society. This power is not a possession, but a trust; it is lent by free and equal persons that their lives, liberties, and estates may be the better secured. A man’s three decades in high office do not convert that trust into property. Length of service may show skill or diligence; it does not of itself show fidelity. The longer the tenure, the greater, not the lesser, the burden to prove that the power has been used for the common good and not insensibly for private or factional ends.

The senator in question was, we are told, a leading voice on foreign policy and later a close ally of the executive power. Foreign engagements are the most terrible exercises of the legislative trust, for there men’s lives are spent in heaps, and treasure with them. In such matters, the law of nature binds rulers and ruled alike: reason teaches, as I there argued, that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions without just cause. A legislature that repeatedly bends toward war or coercion must be able to show that such measures were necessary to preserve the community, not to aggrandize itself or its allies. Without that showing, fair and public, men have cause to fear a slide toward arbitrary power under the fair name of security.

The manner of succession here presses another question. The governor announces an appointment; the appointed declares that she will continue the work of her brother. There is nothing in these few facts that proves a breach of trust. Yet the very language of “continuing the work” within one family calls to mind the old slippage from office to inheritance, from representative to proprietor. Civil power, in my understanding, belongs originally to the people as a whole; they may place it in one set of hands and then another, but they cannot, without contradicting their own equality, turn it into a family estate. When public offices begin to pass, in effect, along bloodlines, even under colour of law, wise men should ask whether consent is real or only ceremonial.

Here my own doctrine shows both its use and its strain. I argued that men consent to government not only by express covenants but by what I called tacit consent: by dwelling within a territory, accepting its protection, and making use of its laws, they must be taken to accept the form of government so long as it secures their civil interests. In the case before us, repeated elections to the legislature and established procedures for appointment do furnish evidence of such consent. Yet I admit that usage can harden into something like necessity, and necessity is a poor parent of free choice. Where the field of candidates is narrowed by party, fortune, or family name, the people’s consent may be more resigned than free.

What, then, may be said with the scant materials at hand? I see no “long train of abuses” plainly laid out, no open endeavour to destroy the property of the people or to subject them to mere will, which is what I take to be the very definition of tyranny. So I will not pronounce this power illegitimate. It stands, for now, as authority held on the old conditions: for the public good, by presumed consent, under laws. But I would urge those who live under it to judge not by the smoothness of succession or the number of years served, but by a stricter rule: does this legislative power, in its acts, clearly prefer the safety and liberty of all over the advancement of a few?

For if ever the legislative, whether in the hands of one family or many, begins to act as judge in its own cause, to secure its continuance and greatness rather than the people’s preservation, it ceases to be a faithful trustee and becomes a rival to those it governs. At that point, the people are not aggressors but defendants; the first rebellion is the rulers’ breach of trust, and the people’s resistance is only their appeal to a higher judge. My hope, in this case as in all, is that such an appeal is never needed, because those who inherit influence remember that power is not an heirloom but a loan, and a loan that may at any moment be called in.