In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institution are
not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are
not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act
of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a
particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may
make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young
citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men
and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all
arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that
society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particle
may suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the system
to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or
Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul,
does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be
treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe
that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy
and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce,
education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure,
though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get
sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish
legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that
the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the
citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only
who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government
which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the
population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are
superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has
in the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there to
say, Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day?
Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon
becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint.
Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and
will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the
pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is opened to more
intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not
articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general
mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic.
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but
shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions
of public bodies; then shall be carried as grievance and bill of
rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and
establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place in turn to
new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse
outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy
of culture and of aspiration.
The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which
they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their
revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whose
protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in
virtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its
whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are
equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are
very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. This
accident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties,
of which there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimony, falls
unequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights,
universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the
census; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and
of owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by
an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off;
and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of
the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban
and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend
their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer
who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether
additional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban
and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection
for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob,
who, because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his
own?
In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and so
long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion would
arise in any equitable community than that property should make the law
for property, and persons the law for persons.
But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do not
create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new owner's, as
labor made it the first owner's: in the other case, of patrimony, the
law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view according
to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.
It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principle
that property should make law for property, and persons for persons;
since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction.
At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the
proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors,
on the Spartan principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not that
which is equal, just."
That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former
times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had
not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to
our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them
poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure
and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on
its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons
deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the
consideration of the State is persons; that property will always follow
persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men; and
if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement
and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.
If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is
less when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by better
guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect.
Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons.
The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen,
die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper,
as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable
majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations
beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things
have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.
Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it is planted and
manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances
are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms,
persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert
their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of
earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid,
convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound; it will always attract
and resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight:--and
the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise,
under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force,--if not
overtly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; if not
wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by might.
The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons
are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an
idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the
religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of
calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest
can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant
actions, out of all proportion to their means; as the Greeks, the
Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.
In like manner to every particle of property belongs its own attraction.
A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other
commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so
much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may
do what it will with the owner of property; its just power will still
attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shall
have power except the owners of property; they shall have no vote.
Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write
every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the
scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of
property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of
course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates.
When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint
treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns
something, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, and so
has that property to dispose of.
The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property
against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the form
and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation and to its
habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of society. In
this country we are very vain of our political institutions, which are
singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men,
from the character and condition of the people, which they still express
with sufficient fidelity,--and we ostentatiously prefer them to any
other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be
wise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democratic
form, but to other states of society, in which religion consecrated the
monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better for
us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better
with it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy,
which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also
relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the
spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects
which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good
men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal
the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages
has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in
the parties, into which each State divides itself, of opponents and
defenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also
founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims
than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their
origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as
wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whose
members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but
stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.
Our quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep natural ground at
the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations, throw
themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belonging
to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst
we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same
charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal
of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties of
circumstance, and not of principle; as the planting interest in conflict
with the commercial; the party of capitalists and that of operatives;
parties which are identical in their moral character, and which can
easily change ground with each other in the support of many of their
measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of
free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition
of capital punishment,--degenerate into personalities, or would inspire
enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which may
be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is that they
do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they
are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying
of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.
Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the nation
between them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other
contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man
will of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade,
for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal
code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and
the poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely
accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as
representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends
which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The
spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not
loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out
of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party,
composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the
population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates
no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no
generous policy; it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts,
nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science,
nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the
immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit
to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the
resources of the nation.
I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at the
mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human
nature always finds itself cherished; as the children of the convicts
at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other
children. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic
institutions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious among
ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with some terror at our
turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of construing the
Constitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor;
and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the
sanctity of Marriage among us; and another thinks he has found it in our
Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely,
when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is a
merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and
go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink,
but then your feet are always in water. No forms can have any dangerous
importance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes no
difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so
long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass
a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is
equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal and
centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own activity develops
the other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty,
by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. 'Lynch-law'
prevails only where there is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in
the leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest requires
that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which
shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as
characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads; and an
abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common
conscience. Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.
Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other.
There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so
many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his
simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, which he calls
Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect
agreement, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, good to wear,
good use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid, each is
entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make
application of to the measuring of land, the apportionment of service,
the protection of life and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt,
are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every
government is an impure theocracy. The idea after which each community
is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The
wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest
efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by causing the
entire people to give their voices on every measure; or by a double
choice to get the representation of the whole; or, by a selection of the
best citizens; or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal
peace by confiding the government to one, who may himself select his
agents. All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common
to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men
exist, perfect where there is only one man.
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character
of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right and their wrong.
Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my
neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for
a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not
sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep
the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more
skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of
wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love
and nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a
practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the
blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the
world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not quite
so intelligible. I can see well enough a great difference between my
setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make somebody
else act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to
tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances
to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public
ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those
which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the
place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are
thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there,
both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over
into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that,
he will never obey me. This is the history of governments,--one man does
something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with
me, taxes me; looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor
shall go to this or that whimsical end,--not as I, but as he happens to
fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay
the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think
they get their money's worth, except for these.
Hence the less government we have the better,--the fewer laws, and the
less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is
the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the
appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of
the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but
a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe; which freedom,
cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is
character; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this coronation
of her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with
the appearance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of
character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He
needs no army, fort, or navy,--he loves men too well; no bribe,
or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no
favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done
thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has
the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home
where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through
him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who
has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs not
husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life.
His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his
presence, frankincense and flowers.
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at
the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the
influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as
the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its
presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the
Annual Register is silent; in the Conversations' Lexicon it is not set
down; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not mentioned
it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and piety
throw into the world, alters the world. The gladiators in the lists
of power feel, through all their frocks of force and simulation, the
presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition are
confession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are the poor
amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its
nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is
because we know how much is due from us that we are impatient to
show some petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a
conscience of this right to grandeur of character, and are false to it.
But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or graceful,
or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to
others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal
life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on the notice of
our companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our
own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad.
We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we
are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain
humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a
fair expression of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet
in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, 'I am not all
here.' Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough,
not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology
for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This
conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a
poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class
of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb they
must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could
enter into strict relations with the best persons and make life serene
around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford
to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covet relations
so hollow and pompous as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be a
charlatan who could afford to be sincere.
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave
the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own
constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we
depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been
very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable,
but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the
revolters; for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any
party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from
all party, and unites him at the same time to the race. It promises
a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the
security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted,
to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State,
has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing
into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his
part in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built,
letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government
of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that all
competition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends even devise
better ways? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid
fear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the system
of force. For, according to the order of nature, which is quite superior
to our will, it stands thus; there will always be a government of force
where men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the code
of force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the
post-office, of the highway, of commerce and the exchange of property,
of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science can be
answered.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to
governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and
instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on
the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things,
to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial
restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen
might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a
confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient
faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of
renovating the State on the principle of right and love. All those
who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and have
admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to
mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the
laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature. Such designs, full
of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except
avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to
think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of
talent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt.
Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with
suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men,--if indeed I can
speak in the plural number,--more exactly, I will say, I have just been
conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will
make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings
might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments,
as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
*****