which does not comport with a military uniformity, and with sweeping annihilation of diversity.

As institutions may be good or bad, so may they be favorable or unfavorable to liberty. They may indeed give to the representative of the institution great freedom, but only for the repression of general freedom. The viziership is an institution all over Asia, and has been so from remote periods, but it is an institution in the spirit of despotism, and forms an active part of the pervading system of Asiatic monarchical absolutism. The star chamber was an institution, and gave much freedom of action to its members, yet the patriots under the Stuarts made it their first business to break down this preposterous institution. When in 1660 the Danes made their king hereditary and absolute, binding him by the only oath that he should never allow his or his successors' power to be restricted, the Danish crown became undoubtedly a new institution, but assuredly not propitious to liberty. Of all the Hellenic tribes the Spartans were probably the most institutional, but they were communists, and communism is hostile to liberty. They dis-individualized the citizens, and, as a matter of course, extinguished in the same degree individual liberty, development and progress. A state in which a citizen could be punished because he had added one more to the commonly adopted number of lute strings, cannot be allowed to have been favorable to liberty.

Many of those very attributes of the institution proper, which make it so valuable in the service of liberty, constitute its inconvenience and danger when the institution is used against it. It is a bulwark, and may protect the enemy of liberty. It is like the press. Modern liberty or civilization cannot dispense with it, yet it may be used as its keenest

enemy.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE INSTITUTION, CONTINUED. INSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY. INSTITUTIONAL LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT.

CIVILIZATION, so closely connected with what we love in modern liberty, as well as progress and security, themselves ingredients of civil liberty, stands in need of stability and continuity, and these cannot be secured without institutions. This is the reason why the historian, when speaking of such organizers or refounders of their nations as Charlemagne, Alfred, Numa, Pelayo, knows of no higher name to give them than that of institutors.

The force of the institution in imparting stability and giving new power to what otherwise must have swiftly passed away, has been illustrated in our own times in mormonism. Every observer who has gravely investigated this repulsive fraud will agree that as for its pretensions and doctrines it must have passed as it came, had it not been for the remarkable character which Joseph Smith possessed as an institutor.1 Thrice blessed is a noble idea, perpetuated in an active institution, as charity in a hôtel-dieu; thrice cursed, a wicked idea embodied in an institution.

The great ability of this man seems to be peculiarly exhibited in his mixture of truth and arrant falsehood, his uncompromising boldness and insolence, and his organizing instituting mind. Two men have met almost simultaneously with great success, in our own times-Joseph Smith and Louis Napoleon. Of the two, the first seems the more clever. What he performed he did against all probability of success, without any assistance from tradition or prestige.

The title of institutor is coveted even by those who represent ideas the very opposite to institutions.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, when he inaugurated his government, dwelt on the "institutions" he had established,' with pride, or a consciousness that the world prizes the founding of good institutions as the greatest work of a statesman and a ruler.

Institutions may not have been viciously conceived, or have grown out of a state of violence or crime, and yet they may have become injurious in the course of time, as incompatible with the pervading spirit of the age, or they may have become hollow, and in this latter case they are almost sure to be

1 He meant, of course, the senate, legislative corps, and the council of state. Why he calls these new institutions we cannot see, but he evidently wished to indicate his own belief, or desired that others should believe, in their permanency, as well perhaps as in their own independent action. To those, however, who consider them as nothing more than the pared and curtailed remnants of former institutions, who do not see that they can enjoy any independent action of their own, and are aware that their very existence depends upon the mere forbearance of the executive; who remember their origin by a mere decree of a dictator bound by no superior law,-to those who know with what studied and habitual sneer "parliamentary governments" are spoken of by the ruling party in France, all these establishments appear in principle no more as real institutions than a tent on a stage. The "constitution" of the present empire (Napoleon I. always spoke of les constitutions de l'empire) is a close copy of the organic laws of the first empire. Now, few of my readers, probably, are aware, that the very name of senatus-consultum, which played so important a part in the first empire, and by which the most violent fundamental changes were effected, was literally smuggled in by Napoleon I. He did so on occasion of the conspiracy of Cerachi and others, when the council of state resolved that no law should be demanded, because that "would lead to discussion." The list of condemned was passed by the council of state, upon a report of the police, not even signed, and the senate adopted and decreed it, as a senatus-consultum. Memoirs of Miot de Melito, (himself a counsellor of state,) vol. i. page 360 and sequ. It hardly deserves mention here, that Napoleon adopted the term from the Roman empire, which was his political beau-ideal, as he did many other terms and symbols.

injurious. Hollow institutions in the state are much like empty boxes in an ill-managed house. They are sure to be filled with litter and rubbish, and to become nuisances. But great wisdom and caution are necessary to decide whether an institution ought to be amputated or not, because it is a notable truth in politics that many important institutions and laws are chiefly efficient as preventives, not as positive agents. It is not sufficient, therefore, that at a glance we do not discover any palpable good produced by the institution, to justify us in destroying it. Antiquity is prima facie evidence in favor of an institution,' and must not rashly be confounded with obsoleteness; but antiquity is certainly no proof against positive and grounded arguments. On the other hand, hollow institutions have frequently the serious inconvenience of deceiving and changing the proper venue, as lawyers would express it. The form of a representative government, without the spirit, true principles and sincere guarantees of self-government in that body, or without being founded upon a candid and real representation, is worse than a government without these forms, because it eases the executive of the responsibility which without that hollow form would visibly rest on it alone.2

1 I am aware that many persons believe now-a-days so little in this truth that not only does antiquity of itself appear to them as a proof of deficiency, but they turn their face from the whole Past, as something to be shunned, thus forgetting the continuity of society, progress and civilization. Mr. Guizot, in his lectures on the History of Representative Governments, delivered in Paris, 1820, found it necessary to warn his hearers against this horror of the past. The reader will find remarks on the impossibility of "beginning entirely anew," in my Political Ethics.

2 Count Miot relates that when Napoleon, as consul, desired to change the entire character of the house of representatives, in order to bring it under the exclusive control of the executive, but hesitated to make an organic change by mere violence, Talleyrand at last suggested, that the other assembly had no business assigned to it; why should it not be made to sanction the measure? The history of the whole consulate, and of the early period of the empire, is a striking and continuous illustration of the assistance which a despot derives from mere forms of liberty without the reality of freedom. It would seem that Napoleon I. established

But here, again, it is necessary to observe that an institution. may for a time become a mere form, and yet that very form may soon be animated again by a proper spirit. Parliament under Henry VIII. had become a subservient tool, highly noxious because it formally sanctioned many atrocious measures of the king. Yet, it was that same parliament which rose to action and importance within fifty years, and within a century and a half became the virtual seat of government and supreme power in the state. There is hardly a portion of the penal trial which has not at times and for an entire period been abused; yet the existence of this very trial, intended to rest on the principle of independence, became in a better period the starting-point of a new order of things.

We must also mention the fact that there are perennial and deciduous institutions, or institutions avowedly fit only for a preparatory state of civilization. Their office is limited in duration, like that of the deciduous teeth, which must be drawn if they do not drop of themselves, or if they resist too obstinately their perennial substitutes.

We may here close our general remarks on institutions, and, now, investigate in what the force of the institution consists, when wisely taken into the service of liberty, and inquire into the characteristics of self-government in particular.

By institutional self-government is meant that popular government which consists in a great organism of institutions or a union of harmonizing systems of laws instinct with self-government. It is essentially of a co-operative

certain forms, in conquered countries, for the very purpose of assigning the appearance of responsibility to certain bodies of the state, while he left the government absolute. It is difficult otherwise to explain the constitution which he decreed for Naples, (page 359, vol. ii. of Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito,) according to which "the national representation" was to consist of one chamber divided into five sections, namely: the clergy, nobility, proprietors, savans, and traders; the clergy, nobility and savans holding their places for life; the others, removable at pleasure by the government. The Roman senate, when it had become the recording body, of the imperial decrees, gave much support to the emperors, by its appearance of an ancient institution.