or coercion. The history of the French revolution is almost one continued commentary on this position. The whole meaning of a legislature, as a necessary element of liberty, is that it be free, and it ceases to be free, so soon as crowds threaten it.

We maintain that the right of petitioning is important, and for this very reason it must neither be treated lightly, on the part of the petitioners, nor wrenched from its meaning and be changed into coercing threat. The petition in free states is an institution, and not an incident as in the despotic government. Resorted to as one of the civil agents by a free people, its distinct uses lie in its direct effect, in inciting and awakening public attention; in keeping alive an important idea, although it may not lead to immediate action; in countenancing those who desire to act and to be supported; in showing public opinion concerning some distinct point; in serving as a safety-valve in times of public excitement, and in being a substitute for unorganized and unreasoning crowds. Its dangers are the dangers of all agents whatever-its abuses, and in the wide-spread weakness of men, which induces them inconsiderately to put down their names, rather than refuse the signature.

16. Closely connected with the right just mentioned is the right of citizens peaceably to meet and to take public matters into consideration, and

17. To organize themselves into associations, whether for political, religious, social, scientific, industrial, commercial or cultural purposes. That this right can become dangerous, and that laws are frequently necessary to protect society against abuse, every one knows perfectly well who has the least. knowledge of the French clubs in the first revolution. But it is with rights, in our political relations, as with the principles of our physical and mental organization-the more elementary and indispensable they are, the more dangerous they become, if not guided by reason. Attempts to suppress their action. lead to mischief and misery. What has been more abused than private and traditional judgment in all the spheres of

thought and taste? Yet both are necessary. What principle of our nature has led, and is daily leading, to more vice and crime than that on which the propagation of our species and the formation of the family depend,' or that which indicates by thirst, the necessity of refreshing the exhausted body? Shall the free sale of cutlery be interfered with, because murders are committed with knives and hatchets ?

The associative principle is an element of progress, protection, and efficient activity. The freer a nation, the more developed we find it in larger or smaller spheres; and the more despotic a government is, the more actively it suppresses all associations. The Roman emperors did not even look with favor upon the associations of handicrafts. In modern times no instances of the power which associations may wield, and of the full extent which a free country may safely allow to their operations, seem to be more striking than those of the Anti-CornLaw League in England, which, by gigantic exertions, ultimately carried free trade in corn against the strongest and most privileged body of land-owners that has probably ever existed, either in modern or ancient times; and, in our own country, the Colonization Society, a private society, planting a new state which will be of great influence in the spreading cause of civilization-a society which, according to the Liberian declaration of independence, "has nobly and in perfect faith redeemed its pledges." In every country, except in the United States and in England, the cry would have been, Im

1 The so-called Shakers endeavor to extirpate this principle, and furnish us with an illustration of the evils arising from the endeavor.

2 A careful study of the whole history of this remarkable association, which in no state of the European continent would have been allowed to rise and expand, is recommended to every student of civil liberty. It is instructive as an instance of perseverance; of an activity the most multifarious, and an organization the most extensive; of combined talent and shrewd adaptation of the means to the end; and, which is always of equal importance, of a proper conception of the end according to the means at our disposal, without which it is impossible to do that which Cicero so highly praised in Brutus, when he said, Quid vult valde vult.

perium in imperio, and both would have been speedily put down.

We may also mention our extensive churches, or the Law Amendment Association in England-a society, which, so far as we can judge at this distance, has already produced most beneficial effects upon English legislation, and which in every other country, occupied by our race, except in the United States, would be stigmatized as an imperium in imperio full of assumption. There is nothing that more forcibly strikes a person. arriving for the first time from the European continent, either in the United States or in England, than the thousandfold evidences of an all-pervading associative spirit in all moral and practical spheres, from the almost universal commercial copartnerships and associations, the "exchanges" of artisans, and banks, to those unofficial yet national associations which rise to real grandeur. Strike out from England or America this feature and principle, and they are no longer the same self-relying, energetic, indomitably active people. The spirit of self-government would be gone. In France, an opposite spirit prevails. Not only does the government believe that it must control everything, but the people themselves seem hardly ever to believe in success until the government has made the undertaking its own.'

1 I cannot forbear mentioning here one of those occurrences, which, although apparently trivial, nevertheless show the constant action of a great principle, as the leaf of a tree reveals to the philosopher, the operation of the vastest elements in nature. At a meeting of the Royal Academy at London in 1852, at which the ministers were present, the premier, Lord Aberdeen, said that "as a fact full of hope, he remarked that for several years the public, in the appreciation of art, had outstripped the government and the parliament itself."

The chief executive officer considers it a fact full of hope that the people have outstripped, in interest and action, the government and parliament. How different would a similar case have presented itself in any of the continental countries!

9

CHAPTER XIII.

PUBLICITY.

18. WE now approach those guarantees of liberty which relate more especially to the government of a free country, and the character of its polity. The first of all we have to mention under this head is publicity of public business. This implies the publicity of legislatures and judicial courts, as well as of all minor transactions that can in their nature be transacted publicly, and also the publication of all important documents and reports, treaties, and whatever else can interest the people at large. It further implies the perfect freedom with which reporters may publish the transactions of public bodies.' Without the latter, the admission of the public would hardly amount in our days to any publicity at all. We do not assem

1 In the year 1857 the following case was decided in the court of common pleas at Columbia, S. C., in favor of the plaintiff. The city council held, in 1855, a public meeting. The editor of one of the city papers being present, was asked by the mayor whether he had come to take notes. The mayor being answered in the affirmative, ordered the chief police officer to turn the editor out of the room, declaring at the time that he acted on the strength of a resolution of the city council. At a later period this procedure was defended on the ground that the city appoints a paper to give, officially, all the transactions of the board. Robert W. Gibbes vs. Edward J. Arthur and John Burdell. This novel case was reported with great care, and published with all the arguments, at Columbia, S. C., in 1857, under the title, Rights of Corporations and Reporters. The public owes thanks to the plaintiff for having perseveringly pursued this surprising case, the first of the kind, it would appear. The pamphlet contains letters of nearly thirty American mayors, testifying that reporters cannot be denied admission to the deliberations of the councils of their cities, although there be an appointed printer to the board.

ble in the markets as the people of antiquity did. The millions depending upon public information, in our national states, could not meet in the market, as was possible in the ancient city-states, even if we had not a representative government. The public journals are in some respects to modern freemen what the agora was to the Athenian, the forum to the Roman. A modern free city-state can be imagined without a public press; a modern free country cannot; although we must never forget the gigantic, and therefore dangerous power which, under certain circumstances, a single public journal may obtain, and, consequently, ought to be counteracted by the means which. lie in the publicity and freedom of the press itself.

Publicity, in connection with civil liberty, means publicity in the transaction of the business of the public, in all branchespublicity in the great process by which public opinion passes over into public will, which is legislation; and publicity in the elaboration of the opinion of the public, as well as in the process of ascertaining or enouncing it by elections. Hence the radical error of secret political societies in free countries. They are intrinsically hostile to liberty.

Important as the printing of transactions, reports, and documents is, it is nevertheless true that oral discussions are a most important feature of Anglican publicity of legislative, judicial, and of many of the common administrative transactions. Modern centralized absolutism has developed a system of writing and secrecy, and consequent formalism, abhorrent to free citizens who exist and feed upon the living word of liberty.' Bureaucracy is founded upon writing, liberty on the

1 The following passage is given here for a twofold purpose. Everything in it applies to the government of the pen on the continent of Europe, and it shows how similar causes have produced similar results in India and under Englishmen, who at home are so adverse to government writing and to bureaucracy. In the Notes on the Northwestern Provinces of India, by Charles Raikes, Magistrate and Collector of Mynpoorie, London, 1853, we find this passage:

"Action, however, and energy, are what we now lay most stress upon, because in days of peace and outward tranquillity these qualities are not always valued at their true price, and their absence is not so palpably