learn how to instruct and spread education. It was a peculiar feature of antiquity that law, religion, dress, the arts and customs, that everything in fact was localized. Modern civilization extends over regions, tends to make uniform, and eradicates even the physical differences of tribes and races.12 Thus made uniform, nations receive and give more freely. If it has pleased God to appoint the Anglican tribe as the first workmen to rear the temple of liberty, shall others find fault with Providence ? The all-pervading law of civilization is physical and mental mutual dependence, and not isolation.

I do not think it necessary to reply here to those perverters of truth who try to justify their denial of liberty to the people on the ground that it is not national. This is done by governments who at the very time copy foreign absolutism. There is doubtless something essential in the idea of national development, but let us never forget two facts: Men, however different, are far more uniform than different; and all the noblest nations have arisen from the mixture of others, from the Greeks to our own.

12 The mutual influence of different literatures is daily extending. Take as an instance the literature of England, France, Germany, and the United States, and add the mutual influence of the journals of these nations. Then consider how many of the elements of civilization are not national, but common to all-the alphabet, the numeric signs, with the decimal system, commercial usages and bookkeeping, social intercourse and laws of politeness, the visiting card, the railway, the steamboat, the post-office, the institution of money, the bill of exchange, insurance-indeed, it is impossible to enumerate all the agreements of nations belonging to our race. I shall only add the dress, the furniture, and even cookery.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE INSTITUTION. ITS DEFINITION. ITS POWER FOR GOOD AND EVIL.

It has been shown that civil liberty, as we understand and cherish it, consists in a large amount of individual rights, checks of power, and guarantees of self-government. We have more or less fully indicated that selfgovernment, in the sense in which we take it, and in connexion with liberty, consists in the independence of the whole political society, in a national representative government and local self-government, which implies that even general laws and impulses are carried out and realized, as far as possible, by citizens who, by receiving an office, be it by election or appointment, essentially remain citizens, and do not become members of a hierarchy of placemen.' We have seen that self-government,

At a sumptuous ball, which the city of Paris gave, in the year 1851, to the commissioners of the London Exhibition, I was sitting in a corner and reflecting on the police officers in their uniforms and the actual patrols of the military pompiers in the very midst of the festive and crowded assemblage, when I was introduced to one of the first statesmen of France and liberal members of the national assembly. He had been at London to view the exhibition. It was the first time he had visited England. "Do you know," said he, "what struck me most-far more than the exhibition of works of art and industry? It was the exhibition of the civism anglais (this was the term he used) in the London police." It may be readily supposed that an American citizen turned his face toward the speaker, to hear more, when the Frenchman continued: "I am in earnest. The large number of policemen, with their citizen appearance, although in uniform, seeming to be there for no other purpose than to assist the people, and the people ever ready to assist them—voilà what has most attracted my attention. Liberty and the government of law are even depicted in their police,

in general, requires that there be an organism to elaborate and ascertain public opinion, and that, when known, it shall pass into law, and, plainly, rule the rulers; that government interfere as an exception, and not as the rule; and that, on the other hand, self-government neither means self-absolutism, nor absence of rule, but that, on the contrary, liberty requires a true government. A weak government is a negation of liberty; it cannot furnish us with a guaranteeing power, nor can it procure supremacy for public will. In other spheres it may be true that the licence is exaggerated liberty, but in politics there can be nothing more unlike liberty than anarchy.

We have still to ascertain how this system of civil liberty is to be realized. Liberty cannot flourish, nor can freedom become a permanent business of actual life, without a permanent love and a habit of liberty. How

where we should seek it least. What is it that strikes you most in coming here ?"

"The American," I replied, "in visiting the Continent of Europe, is most impressed by the fact that the whole population, from Moscow to Lisbon, seems to be divided into two wholly distinct parts-the round hats, the people, and the cocked hats, the visible government. The two layers are as distinct as the hats, and the traveller sees almost as many of the one form as of the other."

I believe that my French interlocutor showed a penetrating mind in thus singling out the English police.

There are large police establishments in all European countries, as all densely peopled countries require them. The different spirit and organization, however, of these establishments are most characteristic. Nothing, perhaps, shows more the character of a citizen-government in England than the wide-spread institution of the police, which has developed itself, under Sir Robert Peel, out of the ancient constable. It has immense power; it has preventive, detective, and custodial power; yet it is supported by the citizens, and no one fears that it will ever be used as an institution of political espionage and denunciation-as delatores of old and mouchards of modern times. It is strictly under the public law, and that implies under publicity. There is a whole literature on this subject, but I know of no brief paper exhibiting so well its essential character as the seventh paragraph of Mittermaier's English, Scottish, and American Penal Processes.

is the one to be engendered, and the other to be acquired?

There is no mathematical formula by which liberty can be solved, nor are there laws by which liberty can be decreed, without other aids. We gain no more by throwing power unchecked into the hands of the people. It remains power, and is not liberty, and people still remain men. Flattery does not change us, for we are

all

"Obnoxious, first and last, To basest things," 2

3

and thus flattery is no foundation for liberty. Each one of us may be declared a sovereign, as every Frenchman was designated in a solemn circular, by the provisional government, or the people may be called almighty-le peuple tout-puissant-as in the midst of loathsome political obscenity they were termed by the dictatorial government when they were expected and led to vote for a new emperor, and by an act of omnipotence to extinguish all. They were asked to divest themselves of this very omnipotence, which nevertheless is claimed for the people alone, as inherent in its own nature, and to submit their omnipotence to a still greater omnipotence of one man. Nothing of all this is liberty. Self-immolation, even when it is an actual and not a theoretical act of free agency, is not life.

Enthusiasm is necessary for liberty as for every great

2 Paradise Lost, book ix. line 170.

3 In a circular sent by the Provisional Government all over France before the general election for the national constituent assembly, in 1848, was this sentence: "Every Frenchman of the age of manhood is a political citizen; every citizen is an elector; every elector is a sovereign. There is no one citizen who can say to another, 'You are more of a sovereign than I.' Contemplate your power, prepare to execute it, and be worthy of entering on the possession of your kingdom." The author of these phrases is M. de Lamartine, who says, in his Revolution of 1848, "The reign of the people is called the republic."

and noble work, but enthusiasm comes and goes like the breezes of the ocean. How shall they be used for the positive interests of the navigator? Enthusiasm is not liberty, nor does the reality of liberty consist in an æsthetical love of freedom. The poet may be as much the priest of liberty, as he is the seer of love; but poetry is no more the thing it sings than theory is the deed, or ethics the character of man.

Education has been considered by many as the true basis of popular liberty. It is unquestionably true, and proudly acknowledged by every lover of modern popular liberty, that a wide-spread and sound education is indispensable to liberty. But it is not liberty itself, nor does it necessarily lead to it. Prussia is one of the best educated of countries, but liberty has not yet found a dwelling-place there. The Chinese government is avowedly based upon general education and democratic equality in the hierarchy of officers, but China has never made a step in the path of liberty. Education is almost like the alphabet it teaches; it depends upon what we use it for. Many despotic governments have found it their interest to promote popular education, and the schoolmaster alone cannot establish or maintain liberty, although he will ever be acknowledged as an efficient and indispensable assistant in the cause of modern freedom.

How then is real and essential self-government, in the service of liberty, to be obtained and to be perpetuated? There is no other means than a vast system of institutions, whose number supports the whole, as the many pillars support the rotunda of our capitol. They may be modest in their appearance, and even unseen by the passer-by, as those pillars are, but they are nevertheless the real support.