surable wealth, but it is diffused, widely spread and widely enjoyed wealth, necessary for widely diffused and widely enjoyed culture.

To last long-to last with liberty and wealth, is the great problem to be solved by a modern state. Our destinies differ from that of brief and brilliant Greece. Let us derive all the benefit from Grecian culture and civilization-from that chosen nation, whose intellectuality and æsthetics, with christian morality, Roman legality and Teutonic individuality and independence, form the main elements of the great phenomenon we designate by the term modern civilization, without adopting her evils and errors, even as we adopt her sculpture with out that religion whose very errors contributed to produce it.

24

CHAPTER XXX I.

INSECURITY OF UNINSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENTS.

IZED INARTICULATED POPULAR POWER.

UNORGAN

THE insecurity of concentrated governments has been discussed in a previous part of this work. The same insecurity exists in all governments that are not of a strongly institutional character. Eastern despotism is exposed to the danger of seraglio conspiracies, as much so as the centralized governments of the European continent showed their insecurity in the year 1848. They tottered and many broke to pieces, although there was, with very few exceptions, no ardent struggle, and nothing that approached to a civil war. To an observer at a distance, it almost appeared as if those governments could be shaken by the loud huzzaing of a crowd. They have, indeed, recovered; but this may be for a time only; nor will it be denied that the lesson, even as it stands, is a pregnant one.

During all that time of angry turmoil, England and the United States stood firm. The government of the latter country was exposed to rude shocks indeed, at the same period; but her institutional character protected her. England has had her revolution; every monarchy probably must pass through such a period of violent change ere civil liberty can be largely established and consciously enjoyed by the people-ere government and people fairly understand one another on the common ground of liberty and self-government. But no fact seems to be so striking in the revolution of England as this, that all her institutions of an organic character, her jury, her common law, her representative legislature, her local self-government, her justice of the peace, her sheriff, her coroner-all survived domestic war and depotism, and, having done so, served as

the basis of an enlarged liberty. The reason of this broad fact cannot be that the English revolution did not occur at a time of bold philosophical speculation which characterized the age of the French revolution. The English religionists of the seventeenth century were as bold, speculative reasoners as the French philosophers, and England's religious fanatics were quite as fierce enemies of private property and society as the French political fanatics were. It was, in my opinion, pre-eminently her institutional character in general, or the whole system of institutions and the degree of self-government contained in each, that saved each single institution, and enabled England to weather the storm when she was exposed to the additional great danger of a worthless general government after the restoration. There is a tenacity of life and a reproductive principle of vitality exhibited in the whole seventeenth century of British history, that cannot be too attentively examined by the candid statesmen of our family of nations.

It may be objected to my remarks that Russia, too, has remained untouched by the attempted revolutions of the year 1848, although her government is a very centralized one. Russia has in some respects much of an Asiatic character, and the succession of her monarchs is marked by an almost equal number of palace conspiracies and imperial murders or imprisonments. The people, on the other hand, have not yet been affected by the political movements of our race. There is in politics, as in all spheres of humanity, such a thing as being below and being above an evil. Many persons that are free from skepticism are not above it, but the dangerous questions have never yet presented themselves; and many nations remain quiet, while others are torn by civil wars, not because they have reached a settled state above revolution, but because they have not yet arrived at the period of contending elements. Russia may be said, in one respect at least, to furnish us

1 A London journal said some years ago, with great bitterness, yet with truth: A Russian czar is a highly assassinative substance.

with the extreme opposite to self-government. "The service," that is, public service, or the being a servant of the imperial government, has been raised in that country to a real culte, a sort of official religion. Any infraction of justice, any hardship, any complaint is passed over with a shrug of the shoulder and the words "the service." The term Service in its present Russian adaptation is the symbol for the most consistent absolutism, the most passive bureaucracy, and a most automatonlike government set in motion by the czar, and it is thus, as it was said before, the extreme opposite to our self-government.

If concentrated governments are insecure, mere unorganized and uninstitutional popular power is no less so, and neither such power nor mere popular opposition to all government is a guarantee of liberty. The first may be the reason why all the Athenian political philosophers of mark looked from their own state of things, during and after the Peloponnesian war, with evident favor upon the Lacedæmonian government. Lacedæmon was, indeed, no home for individual liberty; but they saw in Sparta permanent institutions, and without having arrived at a perfectly clear distinction between an institutional government and one of a fluctuating absolute market majority, they may have perceived, more or less instinctively, that neither permanency nor safety is possible without an institutional system. They must have observed that there was no individual liberty in Sparta; but her institutional character may have struck them, and the contrast may have lent to that government the appearance of substantial value which it did not possess in reality. It seems otherwise difficult to explain why the most reflecting should have preferred a Lacedæmon to an Athens, even if we take into account the general view of the ancients, that individuality must be sacrificed to the state-a view of which I have spoken at the beginning of this work.

As to the second position, that the guarantee of liberty cannot be sought for in mere opposition to government or in a mere negation of power, it is only necessary to reflect that in such a state of things one of three evils must necessarily happen. Either the people are united and succeed in enfeebling or de

stroying the government, in which case again the new government possesses the whole sweeping power, and of course is in turn a negation of liberty; thus substituting absolutism for absolutism. Or the people are not united, do not succeed, and leave the government more powerful and despotic than before. Or a state of affairs is brought about in which all power is destroyed-political asthenia. It is a state of political disintegration, leading necessarily to general ruin, and preparing the way for a new, generally a foreign power, which then rears something fresh upon the ruins of the past-fabrics that are cemented with blood and tears.

There is no other way to escape from the appalling dilemma than to unite the people and government into one living organism, and this can only be done by a widely ramified system of sound institutions, instinct with self-government.

It is not maintained that history does not furnish us with instances of national conditions in which nothing else remained possible but a general rising against a government that had become isolated from the people; but nothing is gained if the new state of things is not founded upon institutions. This is, indeed, a difficult task; at times it would seem impossible. If so, the destruction of the whole is decreed; and its accomplishment adds another lesson to the many stored up in the book of history, that those nations who neglect to provide for institutions, and to allow them freely to grow, are walking the path of political ruin.

We are now fully able to judge how utterly mistaken those are who endeavor to press the opinion upon the people that "there are but two principles between which civilized men have to choose-Divine Right and Democratic Might." The one is as ungodly as the other. Neither is founded in justice; neither admits of liberty; both rest on the principle of absolutism. Both are theories fabricated by despotism, false in logic, unhallowed in practice, and ruinous in their progress.

Allusion has been made before to the common mistake of those men who are not bred in civil liberty, and are unacquainted with the appliances of self-government, that they believe popu