Next follows the Government created and constituted by the convention. The government is constituted in such manner, and has such and only such powers, as the convention ordains. The government has, in the strict sense, no political authority under the American system, which separates the government from the convention. All political questions proper, such as the elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution of the several departments of government, as the legislative, the judicial, and the executive, changing, altering, or amending the constitution of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a word, all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the government, but to the convention; and where the will of the sovereign is not sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a new appeal to the convention is necessary, and may always be had. The constitution of Great Britain makes no distinction between the convention and the government. Theoretically the constitution of Great Britain is feudal, and there is, properly speaking, no British state; there are only the estates, king, lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute the Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the plenitude of political sovereignty. The British Parliament, composed of the three estates, possesses in itself all the powers of the convention in the American constitution, and is at once the convention and the government. The imperial constitution of France recognizes no convention, but clothes the senate with certain political functions, which, in some respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his creature. The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God and the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief of the government. The senate, the council of state, the legislative body, and the emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have properly no political functions, and to give them such functions is to place the sovereign under his own subjects! The real aim of the imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the guise of republicanism. It leaves and is intended to leave the nation no way of practically asserting its sovereignty but by either a revolution or a plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is permissible only where there is no regular government.