On Civil Liberty and Self-government

more of an Englishman or of a republican than anything else. We wonder, as we become acquainted with him in the writings of his mature life, how there could have been any froth of liberty in his youth which brought suspicion upon him, and can only account for the treatment he received from the police of his native country by that dread of revolution which French movements during a generation had aroused, and which, with unnatural sharpness of sight, saw in the youthful deliverers of their country the foes of kings.

The "Civil Liberty and Self-Government" cannot be read profitably without taking into view the events of 1848 and the new empire of Napoleon III. Through the book there is a contrast, which often appears, between Anglican and Gallican liberty, between checks and guarantees, institutions and diffused power, on the one hand, and a government, on the other, with no checks and no institutions, with a centralized power swallowing up all minor authority in the great leviathan, and calling that a government of the people, because the people gave their consent to it once and forever. Our author watched this French system, no doubt, with intense interest, and when he saw the government of lies and of moral corruption falling under the blows of a vigorous foe, it was not as a Prussian or a German that he rejoiced in it, but as a man, a true American and a Christian. Here was the judgment of events, the rebuke of God. If, together with this high satisfaction in catching glimpses of a divine government, we might attribute some pleasure to our author when he found that history was confirming his theory, that he had almost prophesied in this book, and that the hopes of mankind would be the brighter for what happened in 1870, we could not surely find fault with him.

The value of this work in this country consists chiefly in its corrections of some of our prevalent tendencies. In chapter xxii. the author remarks that, as it appears to him, "while the English incline occasionally too much to the historical element, we, in turn, incline occasionally too much toward abstraction;" and further, "that it is certain that we conceive of the rights of the citizen more in the abstract, and more as

attributes of his humanity." Both of these remarks are undoubtedly true. We are inexperienced and self-confident, with small historical knowledge, and we run into abstractions as the easiest things for the least educated to comprehend, and for demagogues to make the starting-point in their projects and deductions. We make little distinction practically between personal and political rights, so that the right of suffrage seems to belong to the human being as such, although, inconsistently, we withhold it still from women and minors. A citizen without suffrage is hardly conceived of. We are coming, too, to believe in a more liberal construction of the general Constitution, so as to throw larger power into the hands of Congress, and to look to the government for help in difficulty; and this at the very time when the newest and wisest reforms in state constitutions are restricting legislatures in the sphere of their functions. The tendency plainly is towards a more centralized government by a freer interpretation of the United States Constitution. The dangers which menace us from this tendency, and from what may be called democratic abstraction, are met by such a book as this, which teaches that there is no safe liberty but one under checks and guarantees, one which is articulated, one which by institutions of local self-government educates the whole people and moderates the force of administrations, one which sets up the check of state power within certain well-defined limits against United States power, one which draws a broad line between the unorganized masses of men calling themselves the people and the people formed into bodies, "joined together and compacted" by constitutions and institutions.

May this book still lead our young men into the paths of political wisdom, and may the old guarantees and checks, the substance of English liberty, with whatever of good we have received that is peculiar to the American people, have, as years roll on, more and more of our confidence and veneration!

THEODORE D. WOOLSEY,

NEW HAVEN, January 28, 1874.