Government.
*The establishment and preservation of order is the prime and essential
function of government*; the prevention and punishment of crime, its
secondary, incidental, perhaps even temporary use. In a perfect state of
society, government would still be necessary; for it would be only by the
observance of common and mutual designations of time, place, and measure,
that each individual member of society could enjoy the largest liberty and
the fullest revenue from objects of desire, compatible with the just
claims and rights of others. These benefits can, under no conceivable
condition in which finite beings can be placed, be secured except by
system, under a central administration, and with the submission of
individual wills and judgments to constituted and established authority. A
bad government, then, is better than none; for a bad government can exist
only by doing a part of its appropriate work, while in a state of anarchy
the whole of that work is left undone and unattempted.
*Obedience to government is*, then, fitting, and therefore a duty,
independently of all considerations as to the wisdom, or even the justice
of its decrees or statutes. If they are unwise, they yet are rules to
which the community can conform itself, and by which its members can make
their plans and govern their expectations, while lawlessness is the
negation alike of guidance for the present and of confidence in the
future. If they are unjust, they yet do less wrong and to fewer persons,
than would be done by individual and sporadic attempts to evade or
neutralize them. Nay, unwise and inequitable laws, to which the habits and
the industrial relations of a people have adjusted themselves, are to be
preferred to vacillating legislation, though in a generally right
direction. Laws that affect important interests should be improved only
with reference to the virtual pledges made by previous legislation, and so
as to guard the interests involved against the injurious effects of new
and revolutionary measures. The tariff regulations of our own country will
illustrate the bearing of this principle. It forms no part of our present
plan to discuss the mooted questions of free trade and protection. But in
the confession of even extreme partisans on either side, the capital and
industry of our people could never have suffered so much from any one
tariff of duties, however injudicious, as they suffered for a series of
years from sudden changes of policy, by which investments that had been
invited by the legislation of one Congress were made fruitless by the
action of the next, and manufactures stimulated into rapid growth by high
protective duties, were arrested and often ruined by their sudden repeal.
The stability of laws is obviously a higher good than their conformity to
the theoretical views of the more enlightened citizens. Except under a
despotism, laws are virtually an expression of the opinion or will of the
majority; and laws which by any combination of favoring circumstances are
enacted in advance of the general opinion, are always liable to speedy
repeal, with a double series of the injurious consequences which can
hardly fail to ensue immediately on any change.
But are there no *limits to obedience*? Undoubtedly there are. A bad law
is to be obeyed for the sake of order; an immoral law is to be disobeyed
for the sake of the individual conscience; and of the moral character of a
particular law, or of action under it, the individual conscience is the
only legitimate judge. Where the law of the land and absolute right are at
variance, the citizen is bound, not only to withhold obedience, but to
avow his belief, and to give it full expression in every legitimate form
and way, by voice and pen, by private influence and through the
ballot-box. But in the interest of the public order, it is his duty to
confine his opposition to legal and constitutional methods, to refrain
from factious and seditious resistance, to avoid, if possible, the
emergency in which disobedience would become his duty, and in case his
conscience constrains him to disobedience, still to show his respect for
the majesty of law by quietly submitting to its penalty. The still recent
history of our country furnishes a case in point. By the Fugitive-Slave
Law—which the Divine providence, indeed, repealed without waiting for the
action of Congress—the private citizen who gave shelter, sustenance, or
comfort to a fugitive slave; who, knowing his hiding-place, omitted to
divulge it, or who, when called upon to assist in arresting him, refused
his aid, was made liable to a heavy fine and a long imprisonment. Now as
to this law, it was obviously the duty of a citizen who regarded the slave
as entitled to the rights of a man, to seek its repeal by all
constitutional methods within his power. It was equally his duty to
refrain from all violent interference with the functionaries charged with
its execution, and to avoid, if possible, all collision with the
government. But if, without his seeking, a fugitive slave had been cast
upon his humane offices, the question then would have arisen whether he
should obey God or man; and to this question he could have had but one
answer. Yet his obedience to God would have lacked its crowning grace, if
he had not meekly yielded to the penalty for his disobedience to the law
of the land. It was by this course that the primitive Christians attested
their loyalty at once to God and to “the powers that be,” which were
“ordained of God.” They refused obedience to the civil authorities in
matters in which their religious duty was compromised; but they neither
resisted nor evaded the penalty for their disobedience. Similar was the
course of the Quakers in England and America almost down to our own time.
They were quiet and useful citizens, performing the same functions with
their fellow-citizens, so far as their consciences permitted, and, where
conscience interposed its veto, taking patiently the distraining of their
goods, and the imprisonment of their bodies, until, by their blameless
lives and their meek endurance, they won from the governments both of the
mother country and of the United States, amnesty for their conscientious
scruples.
There may be a state of society in which it becomes *the duty of good
citizens to assume an illegal attitude, and to perform illegal acts, in
the interest of law and order*. If those who are legally intrusted with
executive and judicial offices are openly, notoriously, and persistently
false to their trusts, to such a degree as to derange and subvert the
social order which it is their function to maintain, good citizens, if
they have the power, have undoubtedly the right to displace them, and to
institute a provisional government for the temporary emergency. A case of
this kind occurred a few years ago in San Francisco. The entire government
of the city had for a series of years been under the control of ruffians
and miscreants, and force and fraud had rendered the ballot-box an
ineffectual remedy. No law-abiding citizen deemed his life or property
safe; gross outrages were committed with impunity; and thieves and
murderers alone had the protection of the municipal authorities.
Despairing of legal remedy, the best citizens of all parties organized
themselves under the direction of a Committee of Safety, forcibly deposed
the municipal magistrates and judges, brought well-known criminals to
trial, conviction, and punishment, reëstablished the integrity of
suffrage, and resigned their power to functionaries lawfully elected,
under whom and their successors the city has enjoyed a degree of order,
tranquillity, and safety at least equal to that of any other great city on
the continent.
*The right of revolution* undoubtedly is inherent in a national body
politic; but it is an extreme right, and is to be exercised only under the
most urgent necessity. Its conditions cannot be strictly defined, and its
exercise can, perhaps, be justified only by its results. A constitutional
government can seldom furnish occasion for violent revolutionary measures;
for every constitution has its own provisions for legal amendment, and the
public sentiment ripe for revolution can hardly fail to be strong enough
to carry the amendments which it craves, through the legal processes,
which, if slow and cumbrous, are immeasurably preferable to the employment
of force and the evils of civil war. On the other hand, a despotic or
arbitrary government may admit of abrogation only by force; and if its
administration violates private rights, imposes unrighteous burdens and
disabilities, suppresses the development of the national resources, and
supersedes the administration of justice or the existence of equitable
relations between class and class or between man and man, the people—the
rightful source and arbiter of government—has manifestly the right to
assert its own authority, and to substitute a constitution and rulers of
its own choice for the sovereignty which has betrayed its trust. Under
similar oppression, the same right unquestionably exists in a remote
colony, or in a nation subject by conquest to a foreign power. If that
power refuses the rights and privileges of subjects to a people over which
it exercises sovereignty, and governs it in its own imagined interests,
with a systematic and persistent disregard to the well-being of the people
thus governed, resistance is a right, and may become a duty. In fine, the
function of government is the maintenance of just and beneficent order; a
government forfeits its rights when it is false to this function; and the
rights thus forfeited revert to the misgoverned people.