own individual capacity. Thousands who have committed acts of crying cruelty as members of the Holy Office would not have been capable of committing them individually. The institution in these cases has the same effect which all united and continuous action has.

On the other hand, institutions have been able, for the same reason, to resist iniquitous inroads, or its members have been wrought up to a manly devotion, when the individual would not, and, often at least, could not, have resisted. In almost all cases of an invasion of rights by one of the domestic powers, we find that some institution has formed the breakwater against the rushing tide of power. There are many instances, such as the "Case of the Bishops" under James II., and the rejoicing of the better disposed Frenchmen, when the court of Paris declared itself, although in vain as it turned out, competent to judge of the spoliation which the dictator had decreed against the Orleans family, that show how instinctively men look toward institutions for support and political salvation.

I have purposely restricted my remarks on the resisting force of institutions to cases of invasion by domestic powers. When foreign invaders trample upon rights and grind down a people, something different and sharper is required to rouse them, to electrify them into united resistance. Humanity itself must be stung; an element in man's very nature must be offended, so that the most patient cannot endure the oppression any longer. We find, therefore, that innumerable popular risings against foreign despots, in antiquity and modern times, have taken place, when the insolent oppressor, having gone all lengths, at last violates a wife or a daughter. Such outrage comes home to the most torpid heart, and will not be borne by the veriest slave.

We investigate, here, the nature of the institution in general. Like everything possessing power, it may serve for weal or woe, as we have seen. Constituted evil is as much worse, as constituted good is more efficaciously good than that effected by the individual. When we know the essential nature of the

Institution, we shall be able to judge when, and where, and how it may be used beneficially. An institution is an arch: but there are arches that support bridges, and cathedrals, and hospitals; and others that support dungeons, banquet rooms of revelry, torture chambers, or spacious halls in which criminal folly enacts a melancholy farce with all the pitiful trappings of unworthy submission.

The greater or less degree in which the institutional spirit of different nations is manifested furnishes us with a striking characteristic of whole nations. The Romans, the Netherlanders, and indeed all the Teutonic tribes, until the dire spirit of dis-individualizing centralization seized nearly all the governments of the European continent, were institutional nations. The English and ourselves are still so. The Russians and all the Sclavonic nations, the Turks and the Mongolian tribes, seem to be remarkably uninstitutional.

A similar remark naturally applies to different species of governments. Some do not only result from a decidedly institutional tendency of the people at large, but they also promote it, while there is in others an inherent antagonism to the institution. No absolutism, whether that of one or many, brooks institutions. Cunning monarchical absolutism, sometimes, allows the forms of institutions to exist, in order to use them for its own purpose. The reason why all absolutism is hostile to living institutions is not only because all absolute rulers discountenance opposition, but because there is in every despotism an ingrained incompatibility with independent action and self-government, in whatsoever narrow circle or moderate degree it may strive to maintain itself. This is so much the case that often despots of the best intentions for the welfare of the people have been the most destructive to the remnants of former, or to the germs of future institutions, in the very proportion in which they have been gifted with brilliant talents, activity and courage. These served them only to press forward more vigorously and more boldly in the career of all absolutism, which consists in the absorption of individuality and institutional action, or in levelling everything

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.' 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.

1 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,1 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.