"The clause was immediately incorporated into the ordinance, and passed by the congress on the 13th day of July, 1787.

“Here, then, we behold the Magna Charta of the internal navigation of America," which we enjoy, and have first enjoyed, of all confederacies, ancient or modern. It gives the absolutely free use of the noblest river system extending over

a continent.

1 This passage is copied from a Defence of the Right and the Duty of the American Union to improve the Navigable Waters, by Samuel B. Ruggles, a speech delivered in October, 1852. The speaker has given his views on this and kindred topics, more extensively in a state paper of rare excellence, whether the contents, the historical survey and statistic knowledge, or the transparency of the style and language be considered. The paper bears the title, Memorial of the Canal Board and Canal Commissioners of the State of New York, asking for the Improvement of the Lake Harbors by the General Government, Albany, N. Y., 1858, and was, as such, adopted by the legislature of New York and presented to congress.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN WHAT CIVIL LIBERTY CONSISTS, PROVED BY CONTRARIES.

I HAVE endeavored to give a sketch of Anglican liberty. It is the liberty we prize and love for a hundred reasons, and which we would love if there were no other reason than that it is liberty. We know that it is the political state most befitting to conscious man. History as well as our own pregnant times prove to us the value of those guarantees; their necessity, if we wish to see our political dignity secure, and their effect upon the stability of government, as well as on the energies of the people. We are proud of our self-government and our love of the law as our master, and we cling the faster to all these ancient and modern guarantees, the more we observe that, wherever the task which men have proposed to themselves is the suppression of liberty, these guarantees are sure to be the first objects of determined and persevering attack. It is instructive for the friend of freedom to observe how uniformly and instinctively the despots of all ages and countries have assailed the different guarantees enumerated in the preceding pages. We can learn much in all practical matters by the rule of contraries. As the arithmetician proves his multiplication by division, and his subtraction by addition, so may we learn what those who love liberty ought to prize, by observing what those who hate freedom suppress or war against. This process is made peculiarly easy as well as interesting at this very period, when the government of a large nation is avowedly engaged in suppressing all liberty and in establishing the most uncompromising monarchical absolutism.

I do not know a single guarantee contained in the foregoing pages, which might not be accompanied by a long historical

commentary showing how necessary it is, from the fact that it has been attacked by those who are plainly and universally acknowledged as having oppressed liberty or as having been, at least, guilty of the inchoate crime. It is a useful way to turn the study of history to account, especially for the youth of free nations. It turns their general ardor to distinct realities, and furnishes the student with confirmations by facts. We ought always to remember that one of the most efficient modes of learning the healthful state of our body and the normal operation of its various organs, consists in the study of their diseased states and abnormal conditions. The pathologic method is an indispensable one in all philosophy and in politics. The imperial time of Rome is as replete with pathetic lessons for the statesman as the republican epoch.

It would lead me far beyond the proper limits of this work, were I to select all the most noted periods of usurpation, or those times in which absolutism, whether monarchical or democratic, has assumed the sway over liberty, and thus to try the gage of our guarantees. It may be well, however, to select a few instances.

In doing so I shall restrict myself to instances taken from the transactions of modern nations of our own race; but the student will do well to compare the bulk of our liberty with the characteristics of ancient and modern despotism in Asia, and see how the absence of our safeguards has there always prevented the development of humanity which we prize so highly. He ought then to compare this our own modern liberty with what is more particularly called antiquity, and see in what we excel the ancients or fall behind them, and in what that which they revered as liberty differed from ours. He ought to keep in mind our guarantees in reading the history of former free states, and of the processes by which they lost their liberty, or of the means to which the enemies of liberty have resorted, from those so masterly delineated by Aristotle, down to Dr. Francia and those of the present time, and he ought again to compare our broadcast national liberty with the liberties of the feudal age. He ought lastly to present clearly to his mind

the psychologic processes by which liberty has been lost-by gratitude, hero-worship, impatience, indolence, permitting great personal popularity to overshadow institutions and laws, hatred against opposite parties or classes, denial of proper power to government, the arrogation of more and more power, and the gradual transition into absolutism; by local jealousies, by love of glory and conquest, by passing unwise laws against a magnified and irritating evil-laws which afterwards serve to oppress all, by recoiling oppression of a part, by poverty and by worthless use of wealth, by sensuality and that indifference which always follows in its train.

Liberty of communion is one of the first requisites of freedom. Wherever, therefore, a government struggles against liberty, this communion forms a subject of peculiar attention. Not only is liberty of the press abolished, but all communion is watched over by the power-holder, or suppressed as far as possible. The spy, the mouchard, the dilator, the informer, the sycophant, are sure accompaniments of absolutism.' The British administration under Charles II. and James II. looked with a jealous eye on the "coffee-houses," and occasionally suppressed them. One of the first things done by the French minister of police, after the second of December, was to close a number of "cabarets" at Paris, and to put all France under surveillance. This may become necessary for a time under pressing circumstances, which may place a government in the position of a general in a beleaguered city, but it is not liberty; it is the contrary, and if the measure is adopted as a permanent one, it becomes sheer despotism. So soon as Louis Napoleon had placed himself at the head of an absolute government, he not only abolished the liberty of the press, but he went much farther, as we have seen; he placed the printing-presses themselves and the sale of type under the police, and ordered that no press with the necessary

1 Much that relates to the history of the spy and informer, in ancient and modern times, may be found in the second volume of Political Ethics, where the citizen's duty of informing is discussed.

printing materials should be sold or change hands without previous information being given to the police.

While it is a characteristic of our liberty that the public funds are under the peculiar guardianship of the popular house of the legislature, and that short appropriations are made for distinct purposes, especially for the army and navy, all governments hostile to liberty endeavor to rule without appropriations, or, if this is not feasible, by having the appropriations made for a long term, and not for detailed purposes. The last decree of Napoleon III., relating to this subject, is that the legislative corps must vote the budget of each department en bloc, that is, in a lump, and either wholly reject or adopt it, without amendment. English history furnishes a long commentary on this point of appropriations. Charles I. lost his head in his struggle for a government without parliament, which then meant, in a great measure, without regular appropriations, or the assumption of ruling by taxation on royal authority. Wherever on the European continent it has been the endeavor to establish a constitutional government, the absolutists have complained of the "indecency" of making governments annually "beg" for supplies.

Liberty requires the supremacy of the law; the supremacy of the law requires the subordination of the army to the legislature and the whole civil government. The Declaration of Rights enumerates the raising and keeping a standing army without consent of parliament, as one of the proofs that James II. had endeavored "to subvert and extirpate the laws and liberties" of England; while all governments reluctantly yielding to the demands of liberty have struggled to prevent at least the obligation of the army to take the oath of fidelity to the constitution. The army is studiously separated from the people, and courted as peculiarly allied to the prince. Napoleon I. treated the army as the church was often treated in the middle ages the main body in the state; and Napoleon III. lately said in a solemn speech that he desired to present the new empress to the people and the army, as if it formed at least one-half of the state and were a body, separate from the