good to the greatest number.  But with these broad admissions, if we would compare the sovereignty acknowledged to exist in the mass of our people with the power claimed by other sovereignties, even by those which have been considered most purely democratic, we shall find a most essential difference.  All others lay claim to power limited only by their own will.  The majority of our citizens, on the contrary, possess a sovereignty with an amount of power precisely equal to that which has been granted to them by the parties to the national compact, and nothing beyond.  We admit of no government by divine right, believing that so far as power is concerned the Beneficent Creator has made no distinction amongst men; that all are upon an equality, and that the only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.  The Constitution of the United States is the instrument containing this grant of power to the several departments composing the Government.  On an examination of that instrument it will be found to contain declarations of power granted and of power withheld.  The latter is also susceptible of division into power which the majority had the right to grant, but which they do not think proper to intrust to their agents, and that which they could not have granted, not being possessed by themselves.  In other words, there are certain rights possessed by each individual American citizen which in his compact with the others he has never surrendered.  Some of them, indeed, he is unable to surrender, being, in the language of our system, unalienable.  The boasted privilege of a Roman citizen was to him a shield only against a petty provincial ruler, whilst the proud democrat of Athens would console himself under a sentence of death for a supposed violation of the national faith—­which no one understood and which at times was the subject of the mockery of all—­or the banishment from his home, his family, and his country with or without an alleged cause, that it was the act not of a single tyrant or hated aristocracy, but of his assembled countrymen.  Far different is the power of our sovereignty.  It can interfere with no one’s faith, prescribe forms of worship for no one’s observance, inflict no punishment but after well-ascertained guilt, the result of investigation under rules prescribed by the Constitution itself.  These precious privileges, and those scarcely less important of giving expression to his thoughts and opinions, either by writing or speaking, unrestrained but by the liability for injury to others, and that of a full participation in all the advantages which flow from the Government, the acknowledged property of all, the American citizen derives from no charter granted by his fellow-man.  He claims them because he is himself a man, fashioned by the same Almighty hand as the rest of his species and entitled to a full share of the blessings with which He has endowed them.  Notwithstanding the limited sovereignty possessed by the people of the