attributes of self-determination, which they hold to be most essential to their idea of humanity; and as this very idea of humanity comprehends partly some ideas common to men of all ages, when once conscious of their humanity, and partly other ideas, which differ according to the view of humanity itself which may prevail at different periods, we shall find, in examining the great subject of civil freedom, that there are certain permanent principles met with wherever we discover any aspiration to liberty; and that, on the other hand, it is rational to speak of ancient, medieval, or modern liberty, of Greek or Roman, Anglican and Gallican, Pagan and Christian, American and English liberty. Certain tribes or nations, moreover, may actually aim at the same objects of liberty, but may have been led, in the course of their history, and accordto the variety of circumstances produced in its long course, to different means to obtain similar ends. So that this fact, likewise, would evolve different systems of civil liberty, either necessarily or only incidentally so. Politics are like architecture, which is determined by the objects the builder has in view, the materials at his disposal, and the desire he feels of manifesting and revealing ideas and aspirations in the material before him. Civil liberty is the idea of liberty in connection with politics, and must necessarily partake of the character or intertwine itself with the whole system of politics of a given

nation.

This view, however correct, has, nevertheless, misled many nations. It is true, that the system of politics must adapt itself to the materials and destinies of a nation; but this very truth is frequently perverted by rulers who wish to withhold liberty from the people, and do it on the plea that the destiny of the nation is conquest, or concentrated action in different spheres of civilization, with which liberty would interfere. In the same manner are, sometimes, whole portions of a people, or even large majorities, misled. They seem to think that there is a fate written somewhere beyond the nation itself, and independent of its own morality, to which everything, even justice and liberty, must be sacrificed. It is at least a very

large portion of the French that thus believes the highest destiny of France to consist in ruling as the first power in Europe, and who openly say, that everything must bend to this great destiny. So are many among us, who seem to believe that the highest destiny of the United States consists in the extension of her territory-a task in which, at best, we can only be imitators, while, on the contrary, our destiny is one of its own, and of a substantive character.

At the present stage of our inquiry, however, we have not time to occupy ourselves with these aberrations.

All that is necessary to vindicate at present is, that it is sound and logical to speak of eternal principles of liberty, and at the same time of ancient and modern liberty, and that there may be, and often must be, various systems of civil liberty, though they need not, on that account, differ as to the intensity of liberty which they guarantee.

That Civil Liberty, or simply Liberty, as it is often called, naturally comes to signify certain measures, institutions, guarantees or forms of government, by which people secure or hope to secure liberty, or an unimpeded action in those civil matters, or those spheres of activity which they hold most important, appears even from ancient writers. When Aristotle, in his work on politics speaks of liberty, he means certain peculiar forms. of government, and he uses these as tests, to decide whether liberty does or does not exist in a polity, which he contemplates at the time. In the Latin language Libertas came to signify what we call republic, or a non-regal government. Respublica did not necessarily mean the same as our word Republic, as our term Commonwealth may mean a republic—a commonwealth man meant a republican in the English revolution'—

1 The republic-if, indeed, we can say that an actual and bona fide republic ever existed in England-was called the State, in contradistinction to the regal government. During the Restoration under Charles II., men would say, "In the times of the State," meaning the interval between the death of the first Charles and the resumption of government by the second. The term State acquired first this peculiar meaning under the Presbyterian government.

but it does not necessarily do so. When we find in Quintilian the expression, Asserere libertatem reipublicæ, we clearly see that respublica does not necessarily mean republic, but only when the commonwealth, the system of public affairs, was what we now call a republic. Since this, however, actually was the case during the best times of Roman history, it was natural that respublica received the meaning of our word republic in most cases.

The term liberty had the same meaning in the middle ages, wherever popular governments supplanted monarchical, often where they superseded aristocratic polities. Liberty and

republic became in these cases synonymous.1

1 It is in a similar sense that Freiligrath, a modern German poet, begins one of his most fervent songs with the line, Die Freiheit ist die Republik; that is, Freedom is the Republic. On the other hand, I found that Prussia, at the time of Frederic the Great, was called, on a few occasions, the Republic, manifestly without any reference to the form of government, and meaning simply the common or public weal or

concern.

CHAPTER IV.

ANCIENT AND MODERN LIBERTY.-ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN STATES.

THAT which the ancients understood by liberty differed essentially from what we moderns call civil liberty. Man appeared to the ancients in his highest and noblest character, when they considered him as a member of the state or as a political being. Man could rise no higher in their view. Citizenship was in their eyes the highest phase of humanity. Aristotle says in this sense, the state is before the individual. With us the state, and consequently the citizenship, remain means-all-important ones, indeed, but still means-to obtain still higher objects, the fullest possible development of humanity in this world and for the world to come. There was no sacrifice of individuality to the state too great for the ancients. The greatest political philosophers of antiquity unite in holding up Sparta as the best regulated commonwealth-a communism in which the individual was sacrificed in such a degree, that to the most brilliant pages of all history she has contributed little more than deeds of bravery and saliant anecdotes of stoic heroism. Greece has rekindled modern civilization, in the restoration of letters. The degenerate keepers of Greek literature and art, who fled from Constantinople when it was conquered by the Turks, and settled in Western Europe, were nevertheless the harbingers of a new era. So great was Grecian knowledge and civilization even in this weakened and crippled state! Yet in all that intellectuality of Greece which lighted our torch in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is hardly a single Lacedæmonian element.

Plato, when he endeavors to depict a model republic, ends

with giving us a communism, in which even individual marriage is destroyed for his higher classes.1

We, on the other hand, acknowledge individual and primordial rights, and seek one of the highest aims of civil liberty in the most efficient protection of individual action, endeavor, and rights. I have dwelt upon this striking and instructive difference at length in my work on Political Ethics,2 where I have endeavored to support the opinion here stated by historical facts and passages of the ancients. I must refer the reader, therefore, to that part of the work; but there is a passage which seems to me so important for the present inquiry, as well as for another which will soon occupy our attention, that, unable to express myself better than I have done in the mentioned work, I must beg leave to insert it here. It is this:

"We consider the protection of the individual as one of the chief subjects of the whole science of politics. The modern èntoτýun, or political science of the ancients, does not occupy itself with the rights of the individual. The ancient science of politics is what we would term the art of government, that is, the art of regulating the state, and the means of preserving and directing it.' The ancients set out from the idea of the state, and deduce every relation of the individual to it from this first position. The moderns acknowledge that the state, however important and indispensable to mankind, however natural, and though of absolute necessity, still is but a means to obtain certain objects, both for the individual and for society collectively, in which the individual is bound to live by his nature. The ancients had not that which the moderns understand by jus naturale, or the law which flows from the

1 It is a striking fact that nearly all political writers who have indulged in creating Utopias-I believe all without exception-have followed so closely the ancient writers, that they rose no higher than to communism. It may be owing in part to the fact that these writers composed their works soon after the restoration of letters, when the ancients naturally ruled the minds of men.

2 Chapter xiii. of the second book.