John R. Puri’s What Governments Are For, in National Review, is one of the cleanest recent statements of the natural-law reading of the American founding. He is right to pull the reader’s eye to the second paragraph of the Declaration and right to fix it on the modifier that most commentary skips: government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That one word is the whole of the matter. The people may organize their powers as they think best for their Safety and Happiness, but they may not exercise powers that were never theirs to confer; the catalogue never included the abridgment of natural rights that government was instituted to secure. In the state of nature every man holds his life, his liberty, and his property by a title older than any statute, and he surrenders to civil society only so much of that title as is necessary to secure the rest. What is beyond necessity, the people cannot give away, because they never held it; and what the people never held, no ballot can create. The grievances against King George are evidence, not principle; the standard by which injuries are judged is the standard of the second paragraph. Madison’s fear of unfettered majorities was real, and his remedy — a national negative on the acts of the states — was rightly rejected, because the people are the principals and the governments only their agents. The defect of democracy is answered not by less self-government but by the discipline of natural right. Self-government is the compound phrase for that discipline: freedom from external domination in the private realm and in the public realm alike. Lincoln’s test is exact. When a man governs himself and also governs another man, that is not self-government; it is despotism.
The essay makes a further point, and here the careless reader will miss its depth. The people must decide how to best secure their rights, in Puri’s own words, “both from one another and from those outside the political society.” From those outside. The sentence presupposes a boundary. There is such a thing as the political society, and there is such a thing as outside it; the two are not an undifferentiated crowd over whom some abstract government presides. The first act of self-government is not the casting of a vote. It is the drawing of the line. A people that cannot say who is of the people is not a people at all. A covenant that cannot be broken is not a covenant; a household that would receive every comer as a member would soon have no household. Puri’s essay is in the great tradition because it takes the boundary as given.
While the essay made its way through the law journals and the policy shops in the same cold week that a seven-year-old girl lay dying on a cot in a holding room of the United States Border Patrol outside El Paso, the boundary was doing its quiet work.
Her name is in the intake logs. It is not in the essay. She was seven. She had left the Guatemalan highlands three weeks before, after the harvest failed, and she walked and rode north with her father. She crossed the river near El Paso. At the crossing she and her father presented themselves to the agents, as the law instructs. The agents took them. The agents processed the family into a facility built of cinderblock and painted the color of a government office. The floor was concrete. There were benches. The father had one thin blanket, and he gave it to the girl.
On the second night her temperature was one hundred and four. She coughed until she vomited. Her father asked the officers for a doctor. The officers wrote it in the log. The log is part of the record.
On the third day she seized. She lay on the concrete floor, her back arched, her arms rigid, a thin green line of mucus at her nose. Her father lifted her and carried her to the desk where the officers sat. The officers wrote in the log and called for the medics. The medics took her to the children’s hospital in El Paso. In the emergency room her temperature was one hundred and five point two. The infection had moved from her lungs into her blood. The attending physician intubated her. Her heart stopped at 8:31 in the evening. The staff worked on the small body for forty-two minutes and could not start it again. The death certificate listed sepsis from an untreated respiratory infection. Border Patrol agents had held her in the station for the three days the infection needed to travel from her lungs to her blood.
The medical examiner’s office kept the body four days while the consulate was called. It was placed in a white coffin sized for a child. A commercial airline carried it to Guatemala City. The father flew the same week, alone. Papers from the Department of Homeland Security accompanied the body.
In the same enforcement order, the border authorities counted more than eight hundred and ninety deaths in a single year in the river and the desert, and the child was of the company that has died in or immediately after the custody of the border authorities in the years the order has taken its present shape — the seven-year-old at the El Paso station in 2018, the eight-year-old who died at an El Paso hospital hours after the agents released him in 2018, the sixteen-year-old in a federal-contracted shelter in 2019. The reports file them by age and cause. The ledger keeps its own order.
The order is not of our making. Scripture says that God has determined the bounds of their habitation, and the Declaration says the same thing in the language of the law: there is a political society, and there are those outside it, and the people are charged to secure their rights from one another and from those outside. The girl came from outside. She was never of the governed. When the agents took her into the station they did not bring her into the covenant; they recorded the fact that she stood outside it. Everything that followed — the cold, the log, the infection, the seizure, the small body on the hospital bed, the white coffin — is the same fact written in another hand. That is what a boundary is for. A wall that lets everyone through is not a wall; it is a line drawn in water. A covenant that receives every stranger without question is not a covenant; it is a sentiment.
The objection runs: she was seven; she came with her father; she did not choose to be outside. The objection mistakes the nature of standing. Standing is not chosen by the one who stands; it is conferred by the household that receives him. The household did not receive her. The law of nature gave the household the power to decide, and the household decided through its officers, its stations, and its ledgers. Her age does not give her a claim upon the inheritance. It describes a person who is outside it. The inheritance belongs to the children of the house, and the house is what its members keep by keeping everyone else out.
Her death is not an accident of administration and not a failure of the order. It is the order’s most legible product: the boundary made visible, the account balanced, the demonstration that the people knew what their inheritance was and would not cast it before those who had not entered it. The essay says the people must secure their rights from those outside the political society. The child who died in the station house is the boundary at work, the sign of the threshold, the answer to the question of who was of us and who was not. She belonged to the habitations God determined for her. The wall stood where the essay placed it.