passive. Retirement is only a morbid selfishness, if it prohibit
exertions for others; as it is only dignified and noble, when it is the
shade whence the oracles issue that are to instruct mankind; and
retirement of this nature is the sole seclusion which a good and wise
man will covet or command. The very philosophy which makes such a man
covet the _quiet_, will make him eschew the _inutility_ of the
hermitage. Very little praiseworthy would LORD BOLINGBROKE have seemed
among his haymakers and ploughmen, if among haymakers and ploughmen he
had looked with an indifferent eye upon a profligate minister and a
venal Parliament. Very little interest would have attached to his beans
and vetches, if beans and vetches had caused him to forget that if he
was happier on a farm he could be more useful in a Senate, and made him
forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re-entering that of a
legislator.
Remember, also, that there is an education which quickens the Intellect,
and leaves the heart hollower or harder than before. There are ethical
lessons in the laws of the heavenly bodies, in the properties of earthly
elements, in geography, chemistry, geology, and all the material
sciences. Things are symbols of Truths. Properties are symbols of
Truths. Science, not teaching moral and spiritual truths, is dead and
dry, of little more real value than to commit to the memory a long row
of unconnected dates, or of the names of bugs or butterflies.
Christianity, it is said, begins from the burning of the false gods by
the people themselves. Education begins with the burning of our
intellectual and moral idols: our prejudices, notions, conceits, our
worthless or ignoble purposes. Especially it is necessary to shake off
the love of worldly gain. With Freedom comes the longing for worldly
advancement. In that race men are ever falling, rising, running, and
falling again. The lust for wealth and the abject dread of poverty delve
the furrows on many a noble brow. The gambler grows old as he watches
the chances. Lawful hazard drives Youth away before its time; and this
Youth draws heavy bills of exchange on Age. Men live, like the engines,
at high pressure, a hundred years in a hundred months; the ledger
becomes the Bible, and the day-book the Book of the Morning Prayer.
Hence flow overreachings and sharp practice, heartless traffic in which
the capitalist buys profit with the lives of the laborers, speculations
that coin a nation's agonies into wealth, and all the other devilish
enginery of Mammon. This, and greed for office, are the two columns at
the entrance to the Temple of Moloch. It is doubtful whether the latter,
blossoming in falsehood, trickery, and fraud, is not even more
pernicious than the former. At all events they are twins, and fitly
mated; and as either gains control of the unfortunate subject, his soul
withers away and decays, and at last dies out. The souls of half the
human race leave them long before they die. The two greeds are twin
plagues of the leprosy, and make the man unclean; and whenever they
break out they spread until "they cover all the skin of him that hath
the plague, from his head even to his foot." Even the raw flesh of the
heart becomes unclean with it.
* * * * *
Alexander of Macedon has left a saying behind him which has survived his
conquests: _"Nothing is nobler than work."_ Work only can keep even
kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an honorable
office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation; to set the
example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of
chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to real greatness.
Work and wages _will_ go together in men's minds, in the most royal
institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that
follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.
Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and uninfluential
is not worth the doing. There is no legal limit to the possible
influences of a good deed or a wise word or a generous effort. Nothing
is really small. Whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows
this. Although, indeed, no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to
philosophy, any more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the
effect, the man of thought and contemplation falls into unfathomable
ecstacies in view of all the decompositions of forces resulting in
unity. All works for all. Destruction is not annihilation, but
regeneration.
Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the
rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is
useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the path of the
molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined
by the fall of grains of sand? Who, then, understands the reciprocal
flow and ebb of the infinitely great and the infinitely small; the
echoing of causes in the abysses of beginning, and the avalanches of
creation? A fleshworm is of account; the small is great; the great is
small; all is in equilibrium in necessity. There are marvellous
relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible Whole, from
sun to grub, there is no scorn: all need each other. Light does not
carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what
it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping
plants. Every bird which flies has the thread of the Infinite in its
claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor, and the tap of a
swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads forward the birth of an
earth-worm and the advent of a Socrates. Where the telescope ends the
microscope begins. Which of them the grander view? A bit of mould is a
Pleiad of flowers--a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration between
the things of the intellect and the things of matter. Elements and
principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another,
to such a degree as to bring the material world and the moral world into
the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back upon themselves.
In the vast cosmical changes the universal life comes and goes in
unknown quantities, enveloping all in the invisible mystery of the
emanations, losing no dream from no single sleep, sowing an animalcule
here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding in curves; making
a force of Light, and an element of Thought; disseminated and
indivisible, dissolving all save that point without length, breadth, or
thickness. The MYSELF; reducing everything to the Soul-atom; making
everything blossom into God; entangling all activities, from the highest
to the lowest, in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism; hanging the
flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth; subordinating,
perhaps, if only by the identity of the law, the eccentric evolutions of
the comet in the firmament, to the whirlings of the infusoria in the
drop of water. A mechanism made of mind, the first motor of which is the
gnat, and its last wheel the zodiac.
A peasant-boy, guiding Blücher by the right one of two roads, the other
being impassable for artillery, enables him to reach Waterloo in time to
save Wellington from a defeat that would have been a rout; and so
enables the kings to imprison Napoleon on a barren rock in mid-ocean. An
unfaithful smith, by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes his
lameness, and, he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider
ends, and the destinies of empires are changed. A generous officer
permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess before leading
him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper dies, and the prisoner
reascends the throne. An unskillful workman repairs the compass, or
malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the
waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written in the history of a
world. What we call accident is but the adamantine chain of indissoluble
connection between all created things. The locust, hatched in the
Arabian sands, the small worm that destroys the cotton-boll, one making
famine in the Orient, the other closing the mills and starving the
workmen and their children in the Occident, with riots and massacres,
are as much the ministers of God as the earthquake; and the fate of
nations depends more on them than on the intellect of its kings and
legislators. A civil war in America will end in shaking the world; and
that war may be caused by the vote of some ignorant prize-fighter or
crazed fanatic in a city or in a Congress, or of some stupid boor in an
obscure country parish. The electricity of universal sympathy, of
action and reaction, pervades everything, the planets and the motes in
the sunbeam. FAUST, with his types, or LUTHER, with his sermons, worked
greater results than Alexander or Hannibal. A single thought sometimes
suffices to overturn a dynasty. A silly song did more to unseat James
the Second than the acquittal of the Bishops. Voltaire, Condorcet, and
Rousseau uttered words that will ring, in change and revolutions,
throughout all the ages.
Remember, that though life is short, Thought and the influences of what
we do or say are immortal; and that no calculus has yet pretended to
ascertain the law of proportion between cause and effect. The hammer of
an English blacksmith, smiting down an insolent official, led to a
rebellion which came near being a revolution. The word well spoken, the
deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest, cannot help but have
their effect. More or less, the effect is inevitable and eternal. The
echoes of the greatest deeds may die away like the echoes of a cry among
the cliffs, and what has been done seem to the human judgment to have
been without result. The unconsidered act of the poorest of men may fire
the train that leads to the subterranean mine, and an empire be rent by
the explosion.
The power of a free people is often at the disposal of a single and
seemingly an unimportant individual;--a terrible and truthful power; for
such a people feel with one heart, and therefore can lift up their
myriad arms for a single blow. And, again, there is no graduated scale
for the measurement of the influences of different intellects upon the
popular mind. Peter the Hermit held no office, yet what a work he
wrought!
* * * * *
From the political point of view there is but a single principle,--the
sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of one's self over
one's self is called LIBERTY. Where two or several of these
sovereignties associate, the State begins. But in this association there
is no abdication. Each sovereignty parts with a certain portion of
itself to form the common right. That portion is the same for all. There
is equal contribution by all to the joint sovereignty. This identity of
concession which each makes to all, is EQUALITY. The common right is
nothing more or less than the protection of all, pouring its rays on
each. This protection of each by all, is FRATERNITY.
Liberty is the summit, Equality the base. Equality is not all vegetation
on a level, a society of big spears of grass and stunted oaks, a
neighborhood of jealousies, emasculating each other. It is, civilly, all
aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all votes having equal
weight; religiously, all consciences having equal rights.
Equality has an organ;--gratuitous and obligatory instruction. We must
begin with the right to the alphabet. The primary school _obligatory_
upon all; the higher school _offered_ to all. Such is the law. From the
same school for all springs equal society. Instruction! Light! all comes
from Light, and all returns to it.
We must learn the thoughts of the common people, if we would be wise and
do any good work. We must look at men, not so much for what Fortune has
given to them with her blind old eyes, as for the gifts Nature has
brought in her lap, and for the use that has been made of them. We
profess to be equal in a Church and in the Lodge: we shall be equal in
the sight of God when He judges the earth. We may well sit on the
pavement together here, in communion and conference, for the few brief
moments that constitute life.
A Democratic Government undoubtedly has its defects, because it is made
and administered by men, and not by the Wise Gods. It cannot be concise
and sharp, like the despotic. When its ire is aroused it develops its
latent strength, and the sturdiest rebel trembles. But its habitual
domestic rule is tolerant, patient, and indecisive. Men are brought
together, first to differ, and then to agree. Affirmation, negation,
discussion, solution: these are the means of attaining truth. Often the
enemy will be at the gates before the babble of the disturbers is
drowned in the chorus of consent. In the Legislative office deliberation
will often defeat decision. Liberty can play the fool like the Tyrants.
Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation; and the steps
of all advancing States are more and more to be picked among the old
rubbish and the new materials. The difficulty lies in discovering the
right path through the chaos of confusion. The adjustment of mutual
rights and wrongs is also more difficult in democracies. We do not see
and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly
from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak,
towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.
Abject dependence on constituents, also, is too common. It is as
miserable a thing as abject dependence on a minister or the favorite of
a Tyrant. It is rare to find a man who can speak out the simple truth
that is in him, honestly and frankly, without fear, favor, or affection,
either to Emperor or People.
Moreover, in assemblies of men, faith in each other is almost always
wanting, unless a terrible pressure of calamity or danger from without
produces cohesion. Hence the constructive power of such assemblies is
generally deficient. The chief triumphs of modern days, in Europe, have
been in pulling down and obliterating; not in building up. But Repeal is
not Reform. Time must bring with him the Restorer and Rebuilder.
Speech, also, is grossly abused in Republics; and if the use of speech
be glorious, its abuse is the most villainous of vices. Rhetoric, Plato
says, is the art of ruling the minds of men. But in democracies it is
too common to _hide_ thought in words, to _overlay_ it, to babble
nonsense. The gleams and glitter of intellectual soap-and-water bubbles
are mistaken for the rainbow-glories of genius. The worthless pyrites is
continually mistaken for gold. Even intellect condescends to
intellectual jugglery, balancing thoughts as a juggler balances pipes on
his chin. In all Congresses we have the inexhaustible flow of babble,
and Faction's clamorous knavery in discussion, until the divine power of
speech, that privilege of man and great gift of God, is no better than
the screech of parrots or the mimicry of monkeys. The mere talker,
however fluent, is barren of deeds in the day of trial.
There are men voluble as women, and as well skilled in fencing with the
tongue: prodigies of speech, misers in deeds. Too much talking, like too
much thinking, destroys the power of action. In human nature, the
thought is only made perfect by deed. Silence is the mother of both. The
trumpeter is not the bravest of the brave. Steel and not brass wins the
day. The great doer of great deeds is mostly slow and slovenly of
speech. There are some men born and bred to betray. Patriotism is their
trade, and their capital is speech. But no noble spirit can plead like
Paul and be false to itself as Judas.
Imposture too commonly rules in republics; they seem to be ever in their
minority; their guardians are self-appointed; and the unjust thrive
better than the just. The Despot, like the night-lion roaring, drowns
all the clamor of tongues at once, and speech, the birthright of the
free man, becomes the bauble of the enslaved.
It is quite true that republics only occasionally, and as it were
accidentally, select their wisest, or even the less incapable among the
incapables, to govern them and legislate for them. If genius, armed with
learning and knowledge, will grasp the reins, the people will reverence
it; if it only modestly offers itself for office, it will be smitten on
the face, even when, in the straits of distress and the agonies of
calamity, it is indispensable to the salvation of the State. Put it upon
the track with the showy and superficial, the conceited, the ignorant,
and impudent, the trickster and charlatan, and the result shall not be a
moment doubtful. The verdicts of Legislatures and the People are like
the verdicts of juries,--sometimes right by accident.
Offices, it is true, are showered, like the rains of Heaven, upon the
just and the unjust. The Roman Augurs that used to laugh in each other's
faces at the simplicity of the vulgar, were also tickled with their own
guile; but no Augur is needed to lead the people astray. They readily
deceive themselves. Let a Republic begin as it may, it will not be out
of its minority before imbecility will be promoted to high places; and
shallow pretence, getting itself puffed into notice, will invade all the
sanctuaries. The most unscrupulous partisanship will prevail, even in
respect to judicial trusts; and the most unjust appointments constantly
be made, although every improper promotion not merely confers one
undeserved favor, but may make a hundred honest cheeks smart with
injustice.
The country is stabbed in the front when those are brought into the
stalled seats who should slink into the dim gallery. Every stamp of
Honor, ill-clutched, is stolen from the Treasury of Merit.
Yet the entrance into the public service, and the promotion in it,
affect both the rights of individuals and those of the nation. Injustice
in bestowing or withholding office ought to be so intolerable in
democratic communities that the least trace of it should be like the
scent of Treason. It is not universally true that all citizens of equal
character have an equal claim to knock at the door of every public
office and demand admittance. When any man presents himself for service
he has a right to aspire to the highest body at once, if he can show his
fitness for such a beginning,--that he is fitter than the rest who
offer themselves for the same post. The entry into it can only justly be
made through the door of merit. And whenever any one aspires to and
attains such high post, especially if by unfair and disreputable and
indecent means, and is afterward found to be a signal failure, he should
at once be beheaded. He is the worst among the public enemies.
When a man sufficiently reveals himself, all others should be proud to
give him due precedence. When the power of promotion is abused in the
grand passages of life whether by People, Legislature, or Executive, the
unjust decision recoils on the judge at once. That is not only a gross,
but a willful shortness of sight, that cannot discover the deserving. If
one will look hard, long, and honestly, he will not fail to discern
merit, genius, and qualification; and the eyes and voice of the Press
and Public should condemn and denounce injustice wherever she rears her
horrid head.
_"The tools to the workmen!"_ no other principle will save a Republic
from destruction, either by civil war or the dry-rot. They tend to
decay, do all we can to prevent it, like human bodies. If they try the
experiment of governing themselves by their smallest, they slide
downward to the unavoidable abyss with tenfold velocity; and there never
has been a Republic that has not followed that fatal course.
But however palpable and gross the inherent defects of democratic
governments, and fatal as the results finally and inevitably are, we
need only glance at the reigns of Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula, of
Heliogabalus and Caracalla, of Domitian and Commodus, to recognize that
the difference between freedom and despotism is as wide as that between
Heaven and Hell. The cruelty, baseness, and insanity of tyrants are
incredible. Let him who complains of the fickle humors and inconstancy
of a free people, read Pliny's character of Domitian. If the great man
in a Republic cannot win office without descending to low arts and
whining beggary and the judicious use of sneaking lies, let him remain
in retirement, and use the pen. Tacitus and Juvenal held no office. Let
History and Satire punish the pretender as they crucify the despot. The
revenges of the intellect are terrible and just.
Let Masonry use the pen and the printing-press in the free State against
the Demagogue; in the Despotism against the Tyrant. History offers
examples and encouragement. All history, for four thousand years, being
filled with violated rights and the sufferings of the people, each
period of history brings with it such protest as is possible to it.
Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but there was a Juvenal. The
arousing of indignation replaces the Gracchi. Under the Cæsars there is
the exile of Syene; there is also the author of the Annals. As the
Nero's reign darkly they should be pictured so. Work with the graver
only would be pale; into the grooves should be poured a concentrated
prose that bites.
Despots are an aid to thinkers. Speech enchained is speech terrible. The
writer doubles and triples his style, when silence is imposed by a
master upon the people. There springs from this silence a certain
mysterious fullness, which filters and freezes into brass in the
thoughts. Compression in the history produces conciseness in the
historian. The granitic solidity of some celebrated prose is only a
condensation produced by the Tyrant. Tyranny constrains the writer to
shortenings of diameter which are increases of strength. The Ciceronian
period, hardly sufficient upon Verres, would lose its edge upon
Caligula.
The Demagogue is the predecessor of the Despot. One springs from the
other's loins. He who will basely fawn on those who have office to
bestow, will betray like Iscariot, and prove a miserable and pitiable
failure. Let the new Junius lash such men as they deserve, and History
make them immortal in infamy; since their influences culminate in ruin.
The Republic that employs and honors the shallow, the superficial, the
base,
"who crouch
Unto the offal of an office promised,"
at last weeps tears of blood for its fatal error. Of such supreme folly,
the sure fruit is damnation. Let the nobility of every great heart,
condensed into justice and truth, strike such creatures like a
thunderbolt! If you can do no more, you can at least condemn by your
vote, and ostracise by denunciation.
It is true that, as the Czars are absolute, they have it in their power
to select the best for the public service. It is true that the beginner
of a dynasty generally does so; and that when monarchies are in their
prime, pretence and shallowness do not thrive and prosper and get power,
as they do in Republics. All do not gabble in the Parliament of a
Kingdom, as in the Congress of a Democracy. The incapables do not go
undetected there, _all_ their lives.
But dynasties speedily decay and run out. At last they dwindle down into
imbecility; and the dull or flippant Members of Congresses are at least
the intellectual peers of the vast majority of kings. The great man, the
Julius Caesar, the Charlemagne, Cromwell, Napoleon, reigns of right. He
is the wisest and the strongest. The incapables and imbeciles succeed
and are usurpers; and fear makes them cruel. After Julius came Caracalla
and Galba; after Charlemagne, the lunatic Charles the Sixth. So the
Saracenic dynasty dwindled out; the Capets, the Stuarts, the Bourbons;
the last of these producing Bomba, the ape of Domitian.
* * * * *
Man is by nature cruel, like the tigers. The barbarian, and the tool of
the tyrant, and the civilized fanatic, enjoy the sufferings of others,
as the children enjoy the contortions of maimed flies. Absolute Power,
once in fear for the safety of its tenure, cannot but be cruel.