people. When he gave eagles to the whole army at what is called the fête of the eagles, in 1852, he said: "The history of nations is in a great measure the history of armies," and continued in a strain sounding as if it belonged to the times of the migration of nations.1

But English and American freemen will never forget that the highest glory of a great people, and that by which it most signally performs the task assigned to it in the furtherance of our race, are its literature and its law, if this consists in a wise system founded on justice, humanity and freedom.

The supremacy of the law is an elementary requisite of liberty. All absolutism spurns, and has a peculiar dislike of, the idea of fundamental laws. Aristotle enumerates as the fourth species of government that in which the multitude and not the law is the supreme master; James II. claimed the dispensing power, and Louis Napoleon affirmed, when yet president under the republican constitution, which prohibited his re-election, that if the people wanted him to continue in office, he should do it nevertheless, and all his adherents declared that the people being the masters could do as they liked,

1 I quote the whole passage of this stupendous allocution, which no historian or political philosopher, had he discovered it, as Cuvier found and construed remains of animals, would have assigned to the middle of the nineteenth century. What becomes of England and the United States if the essence of history does not lie in the development of the nation and especially of its institutions? The following are the exact words:

Soldiers, the history of nations is in great part the history of armies. On their success, or on their reverses, depends the fate of civilization and of the country. When they are vanquished, there is either invasion or anarchy; when victorious, glory or order.

"In consequence, nations, like armies, pay a religious veneration to the emblems of military honor, which sum up in themselves a whole past existence of struggles and of triumphs.

"The Roman eagle, adopted by the Emperor Napoleon at the commencement of the present century, was the most striking signification of the regeneration and grandeur of France;" and so on.

When the democratic Cæsar reviewed the guards, before they started for the Crimea, in 1855, he called the army the nobility of the French nation.

which reminds us of the Athenians who impatiently exclaimed: "Can we not do what we list?" when told that there was a law forbidding what they intended to do.

The division of power, which was already observed as an important point in government by "the master of all that know," is invariably broken down as far as possible by the absolutists. The judiciary is interfered with whenever its slow procedure or its probable results irritate the power-holder. The history of all nations from the earliest times to Napoleon III.'s taking the trial on the legality of the Orleans spoliation out of the hands of the judiciary, proves it on every page.

Self-government, general as well as local, is indispensable to our liberty, but interference and dictation are the essence of absolutism. Monarchical absolutisms presume to do everything and to provide for everything, and Robespierre, in his "great speech" for the restoration of the Supreme Being, said: The function of government is to direct the moral and physical forces of the nation. For this purpose the aim of a constitutional government is the republic.1

Liberty requires that every one should be judged by his common court. All despots insist on extraordinary courts, courts of commission, and an easy application of martial law.

Forcible expatriation or deportation "beyond the seas" by the executive is looked upon with peculiar horror by all freemen. The English were roused by it to resistance; Napoleon III. began his absolute reign with exile and deportation. So did the Greek factions banish their opponents when they had the power of doing so, because no "opposition" in the modern sense was known to them. With them it was the blundering business of factions; moderns know better, and if they return to it, it is because despotism is a thing full of fear and love of show.

How great an offence it is to deprive a man of his lawful

1 The words of Robespierre are sufficiently clear, if taken as an illustration of what has been stated in the text; otherwise, I own, the sense is not perfectly apparent.

court and to judge him by aught else than by the laws of the land, now in the middle of the nineteenth century, will appear the more forcibly, if the reader will bring to his mind that passage of Magna Charta which appeared to Chatham worth all the classics, and if he will remember the year when the Great Charter was carried. The passage, so pregnant to the mind of Chatham, is this:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we (the king) pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man, justice or right."

Publicity is a condition without which liberty cannot live. The moment it had been concluded by the present government of France to root out civil freedom, it was ordained that neither the remarks of the members of the legislative corps, nor the pleadings in the courts of justice, should be reported in the papers. Modern political publicity, however, consists chiefly in publication through the journals. We acknowledge this practically by the fact that, although our courts are never closed,1 yet, for particular reasons arising out of the case under consideration, the publication of the proceedings is sometimes prohibited by the judge until the close of the trial, but never beyond it.

Liberty stands in need of the legal precedent, and Charles I. pursued Cotton because he furnished Pym and other patriots with precedents, while the present French government has excluded instruction in history from the plan of general education. History, in a certain point of view, may be called the great precedent. History is of all branches the most nourishing for public life and liberty. It furnishes a strong pabulum and incites by great examples removed beyond all party or selfish views. The favorite book of Chatham was Plutarch, and his son educated himself upon Thucydides. The best

2

1 Very scandalous judicial cases, offensive to public morals, are, in France, conducted with closed doors.

2 So Bishop Tomlinson tells us in the Life of his pupil.

historians have been produced by liberty, and the despot is consistent when he wishes to shackle the noble muse.

Sincere civil liberty requires that the legislature should have the initiative. All governments reluctant to grant full liberty have withheld it, and one of the first things decreed by Louis Napoleon after the second of December was that the "legislative corps" should discuss such propositions of laws only as the council of state should send to it. The council of state, however, is a mere body of officers appointed and discharged at the will of the ruler.

Liberty requires that government do not form a body permanently and essentially separated from the people; all modern absolute rulers have resorted to a number of distinctionstitles, ribbons, orders, peacock feathers and buttons, uniforms, or whatever other means of separating individuals from the people at large may seem expedient. Liberty requires the trial by jury. first attacks which arbitrary power regularly directed against that trial. preparation in France, of which the outlines have been published, and which will place the jurors under the almost exclusive influence of the government.

Consequently one of the makes upon freedom is There is now a law in

Liberty requires, as we have seen, a candid and wellguaranteed trial for treason; all despotic governments, on the contrary, endeavor to break down these guarantees in particular. They arrogate the power of condemning political offenders without trial, or strip the trial for treason of its best guarantees.

But we might go through the whole list of safeguards and principles of liberty, and find that in each case absolutism does the opposite.

If the American peruses the Declaration of Independence, he will find there, in the complaints of our forefathers, almost a complete list of those rights, privileges, and guarantees which they held dearest and most essential to liberty; for they believed that nearly every guarantee had been assailed.

CHAPTER XXIV.

GALLICAN LIBERTY. SPREADING OF LIBERTY.

HAVING considered Anglican liberty, it will be proper for us to examine the French type of civil freedom, or Gallican liberty.

In speaking here of Gallican liberty, we mean, of course, that liberty which is characteristically French, either in reality, if we shall find that at any period it has taken actual root, or in theory, if it have remained such, and never practically developed itself. Liberty has sprouted in France as in other countries. People have felt there, as all over Europe, that the administration of justice ought to be independent of the other branches of government. The separation of the three great functions of government was proclaimed by the first constituent assembly. But the question here is, whether any of these or other endeavors to establish liberty have been consolidated into permanent institutions, whether they have been allowed to develop themselves, and whether they were or are peculiar to the French, or were adopted from another system of developed civil liberty, as we adopt the whole or parts of an order of architecture or a philosophical system; and, if we find no such institutions or guarantees peculiar to the French, whether there be a general idea and conception of liberty which pervades all France and is peculiar to that country.

In viewing the French institutions, which have been intended for the protection of individual rights or the preservation of liberty, I can discover none which has had a permanent existence, except the court of cassation or quashing. It is the highest court of France, possessing the power of annulling or