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with whom liberty is more than a theory, or something æsthetically longed for, and who learn liberty as the artisan learns his craft, by handling it,—all that we know is, that it is not liberty, that it is directly destructive of it.

It was formerly the belief that standing armies were incompatible with liberty, and a very small one was granted to the king of England with much reluctance; and in France we have a gigantic standing army, itself incompatible with liberty, for whom, in addition, the right of voting is claimed.

The Bill of Rights, and our own Declaration of Independence, show how large a place the army occupied in the minds of the patriotic citizens and statesmen who drew up those historic documents, the reasons they had to mention it repeatedly, and of erecting fences against it.

Military bodies ought not to be allowed even the right of petitioning, as bodies. History fully proves the danger that must be guarded against.* English history, as well as that of other nations, furnishes us with instructive instances.

14. Akin to the last-mentioned guarantee, is that which secures to every citizen the right of possessing

I do not consider myself authorised to say that the Anglicans consider it an elementary guarantee of liberty not to be subjected to the obligation of serving in the standing army; but certain it is that, as matters now stand, and as our feelings now are, we should not consider it compatible with individual liberty; indeed, it would be considered as intolerable oppression, if we were forced to spend part of our lives in the standing army: it would not be tolerated. The feeling would be as strong as against the French system of conscription, which drafts by lot a certain number of young men for the army, and permits those who have been drafted to furnish substitutes; as against the Prussian system, which obliges every one, from the highest to the lowest, to serve a certain time in the standing army, with the exception only of a few "mediatized princes." The Anglicans, therefore, may be said to be unequivocally in favour of enlisted standing armies, where standing armies are necessary.

Our constitution says:

"The right

and bearing arms. of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon;" and the Bill of Rights secured this right to every Protestant. It extends now to every English subject.

Wherever attempts at establishing liberty have been made in recent times, on the Continent of Europe, a general military organization of the people, or "national guards," has been deemed necessary, but we cannot point them out as characteristics of Anglican liberty.

CHAPTER XII.

PETITION. ASSOCIATION.

15. We pass over to the great right of petitioning, so jealously suppressed wherever absolute power rules or desires to establish itself, so distinctly contended for by the English in their revolution, and so positively acknowledged by our constitution.

An American statesman of great mark has spoken lightly of the right of petition in a country in which the citizens are so fully represented as with us;' but this is an error. It is a right which can be abused, like any other right, and which in the United States is so far abused as to deprive the petition of weight and importance. It is nevertheless a sacred right, which in difficult times shows itself in its full magnitude, frequently serves as a safety-valve, if judiciously treated by the recipients, and may give to the representatives or other bodies the most valuable information. It may right many a wrong, and the privation of it would at once be felt by every freeman as a degradation. The

2

1 It was stated that the right of petition was of essential value only in a monarch, against the encroachments of the crown. But this whole view was unquestionably a confined one, and caused by irritation against a peculiar class of persevering petitioners.

2 There is no more striking instance on record, so far as our knowledge goes, than the formidable petition of the Chartists in 1848, and the calm and respect with which this threatening document was received by the Commons, after a speech full of dignity and manly acknowledgment of the people by Lord Morpeth, now Earl of Carlisle.

right of petitioning is indeed a necessary consequence of the right of free speech and deliberation, a simple, primitive, and natural right. As a privilege, it is not even denied the creature in addressing the Deity. It is so natural a right, in all spheres where there are superiors and inferiors, that its special acknowledgment in charters or by-laws, would be surprising, had not ample experience shown the necessity of expressing it.

16. Closely connected with the right just mentioned, is the right of citizens peaceably to meet and to take public matters into consideration; and

17. To organize themselves into associations, whether for political, religious, social, scientific, industrial, commercial, or cultural purposes. That this right can become dangerous, and that laws are frequently necessary to protect society against abuse, every one knows perfectly well who has the least knowledge of the French clubs in the first revolution. But it is with rights, in our political relations, as with the principles of our physical and mental organization—the more elementary and indispensable they are, the more dangerous they become, if not guided by reason. Attempts to suppress their action lead to mischief and misery. What has been more abused than private and traditional judgment, in all the spheres of thought and taste? Yet both are necessary. What principle of our nature has led, and s daily leading, to more vice and crime than that on which the propagation of our species and the formation of the family depend, or that which indicates by thirst the necessity of refreshing the exhausted body? Shall the free sale of cutlery be interfered with, because murders are committed with knives and hatchets ?

3 The so-called Shakers endeavour to extirpate this principle, and furnish us with an illustration.

The associative principle is an element of progress, pretection, and efficient activity. The freer a nation, the more developed we find it in larger or smaller spheres; and the more despotic a government is, the more actively it suppresses all associations. The Roman emperors did not even suffer the associations of handicrafts. In modern times no instances of the power which associations may wield, and of the full extent which a free country may safely allow to their operations, seem to be more striking than those of the Anti-Corn-law League in England, which, by gigantic exertions, ultimately carried free trade in corn against the strongest and most privileged body of landowners that has probably ever existed, either in modern or ancient times; and, in our own country, the Colonization Society, a private society, planting a new state which will be of the vastest influence in the spreading cause of civilization-a society which, according to the Liberian declaration of independence, "has nobly and in perfect faith redeemed its pledges." In every country, except in the United States and in England, the cry would have been, Imperium in imperio, and both would have been speedily put down.

We may also mention our extensive churches, or the Law Reform Association in England. There is nothing that more forcibly strikes a person arriving for the first time from the European Continent, either in the United

A careful study of the whole history of this remarkable association, which in no state of the European Continent would have been allowed to rise and expand, is recommended to every student of civil liberty. It is instructive as an instance of perseverance; of an activity the most multifarious, and organization the most extensive; of combined talent and shrewd adaptation of the means to the end; and, which is always of equal impor tance, of a proper conception of the end according to the means at our disposal, without which it is impossible to do that which Cicero so highly praised in Brutus, when he said, "Quid vult valde vult."

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