1 INTRODUCTORY. WE live at a period when it is th ing men to ponder conscientiously questions: In what does civil liber is it maintained? What are its m sion, and under what forms do present themselves? Our age, marked by restless acti departments of knowledge, and aspirations before unknown, is sta racteristic more deeply than by a or extend freedom among the po mankind. At no previous perio dern, has this impulse been felt at and by such extensive numbers. liberty is so leading a motive in o man who does not understand wh has acquired that self-knowledge do not know where we stand, and raries, or merely instinctive follo conscious, working members of ou and generation. The first half of our century ha VOL. I.-3 than three hundred political constitutions, some few of substance and sterling worth, many transient like ephemeral beings, but all of them testifying to the endeavors of our age, and plainly pointing out the high problem that must be solved; many of them leaving roots in despite of their short existence, which some day will sprout and prosper. It is in history as in nature. Of all the seeds that germinate, but few grow up to be trees, and of all the millions of blossoms, but few ripen into fruit. Changes, frequently far greater than are felt by those who stand in the midst of them, have taken place; violent convulsions have shaken large and small countries, and blood has been shed. Blood. has always flowed before great ideas could settle into actual institutions, or before the yearnings of humanity could become realities. Every marked struggle in the progress of civilization has its period of convulsion. Our race is in that period now, and thus our times 'resemble the epoch of the reformation. Many who unreservedly adhere to the past, or who fear its evils less than those of change, resist the present longings of our kind, and seem to forget, that change is always going on, whether we will or not. States consist of living beings, and life is change. Others seem to claim a right of revolution for governments, denying it to the people, and large portions of the people have overleaped civil liberty itself. They daringly disavow it, and pretend to believe that they find the solution of the great problem of our times either in an annihilation of individuality, or in an apotheosis of individual man, and preach communism, individual sovereignty, or the utmost concentration of all power and political action in one Cæsar. "Parliamentary liberty" is a term sneeringly used in whole countries to designate what they consider an obsolete encumbrance and decaying remnants of a political phase belonging to the past. The representative system is laughed at, and the idol of monarchical or popular absolutism is draped anew, and worshipped by thousands as if it were the latest avatar of their political god. We must find our way through these mazes. This is one of our duties, because it has pleased Providence to cast our lot in the middle of the nineteenth century, and because an earnest man ought to know, above all social things, his own times. Besides these general considerations, weighty as they are, there are others which press more immediately upon ourselves. Most of us descend in blood, and all of us politically, from that nation to which has been assigned in common with ourselves the high duty of developing modern civil liberty, and whose manliness and wisdom, combined with a certain historical good fortune, which enabled it to turn to advantage elements that proved sources of evil elsewhere, have saved it from the blight of absorbing centralization. England was the earliest country to put an end to feudal isolation, while still retaining independent institutions, and to unite the estates into a powerful general parliament, able to protect the nation against the crown. There, too, |