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the dignity of a thorough discussion. The hope of being able absolutely to define things that belong either to the commonest life or the highest regions, betrays inexperience and proves a misconception of human language, which itself is never absolute except in mathematics. It misleads. Bacon, so illustrious as a thinker, has two dicta which it will be well for us to remember throughout this discussion. He says: "Generalities are barren, and the multiplicity of single facts present nothing but confusion. The middle principles alone are solid, orderly, and fruitful;" and in another part of his immortal works he states that "civil knowledge is of all others the most immersed in matter and the hardliest reduced to axioms." We may safely add: "And expressed in definitions." It would be easy, indeed, and correct, as far as it would go, to say: Civil liberty is the idea of liberty, which is untrammelled action, applied to the sphere of politics; but although this definition might be called "orderly," it would certainly neither be "solid" nor "fruitful," unless a long discussion should follow on what it means in reality and practice.

This does by no means, however, affect the importance of investigating the subject of civil liberty and of clearly presenting to our minds what we mean by it, and of what elements it consists. Disorders of great public inconvenience, even bloodshed and political crimes have often arisen from the fact that the two sacred words, Liberty and People were freely and passionately used without a clear and definite meaning being attached to them. A people that loves liberty can do nothing better to

promote the object of its love than deeply to study it, and in order to be able to do this, it is necessary to analyze and to know the threads which compose the valued texture.

In a general way, it may here be stated as an explanation-not offered as a definition-that when the term Civil Liberty is used, there is now always meant a high degree of mutually guaranteed protection against interference with the interests and rights, held dear and important by large classes of civilized men or by all the members of a state, together with an effectual share in the making and administration of the laws as the best apparatus to secure that protection, and constituting the most dignified government of men who are conscious of their rights and of the destiny of humanity. But what are these guarantees? these interests and rights? Who are civilized men? In what does that share consist? Which are the men that are conscious of their rights? What is the. destiny of humanity? Who are the large classes?

I mean by civil liberty that liberty which plainly results from the application of the general idea of freedom to the civil state of man, that is, to his relations as a political being-a being obliged by his nature and destined by his Creator to live in society. Civil liberty is the result of man's twofold character, as an individual and social being, so soon as both are equally respected.

All men desire freedom of action. We have this desire, in some degree, even. in common with the animal, where it manifests itself at least as a desire for freedom of motion. The fiercest despot desires

liberty as much as the most ardent republican; indeed, the difficulty is that he desires it too muchselfishly, exclusively. He wants it for himself alone. He has not elevated himself to that idea of granting to his fellows the same liberty which he claims for himself, and of desiring to be limited in his own power to trench on the same liberty of others. It is one of the greatest ideas to which man can rise. In this mutual grant and check lies the essence of civil liberty, as we shall presently see more fully, and in

2 I believe that this has never been shown with greater and more truculent naïveté, than by the present King of Dahomey in the letter he wrote to the Queen of England in 1852. Every case in which an idea, bad or good, is carried to a point of extreme consistency is worth being noted; I shall give therefore a part of it.

The British government had sent an agent to that king, with presents, and the direction to prevent him from further trade in slaves; and the king's answer contains the following passage:

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'The king of Dahomey presents his compliments to the queen of England. The presents which she has sent him are very acceptable and are good to his face. When governor Winiett visited the king, the king told him that he must consult his people before he could give a final answer about the slave-trade. that he and his people can do without it. It is from the slave-trade that he derives his principal revenue. This he has explained in a long palaver to Mr. Cruikshank. He begs the queen of England to put a stop to the slave-trade everywhere else, and allow him to continue it."

In another passage he says:

"The king begs the queen to make a law that no ships be allowed to trade at any place near his dominions lower down the coast than Whydah, as by means of trading vessels the people are getting rich and resisting his authority. He hopes the queen will send him some good tower guns and blunderbusses and plenty of them, to enable him to make war," (which means razzais, in order to carry off captives for the barracu, or slave market.)

it lies its dignity. It is a grave error to suppose that the best government is absolutism with a wise and noble despot at the head of the state. As to consequences it is even worse than absolutism with a tyrant at its head. The tyrant may lead to reflection and resistance; the wisdom and brilliancy, however, of the government of a great despot or dictator deceives and unfits the people for a better civil state. This is at least true with reference to all tribes not utterly lost in despotism as the Asiatics are. The periods succeeding those of great and brilliant despots have always been calamitous. The noblest human work-nobler even than literature and science, is broad civil liberty, well secured and wisely handled. The highest ethical and social production of which man, with his inseparable moral, jural, æsthetic and religious attributes is capable, is the comprehensive and minutely organic self-government of a free people; and a people truly free at home, and dealing in fairness and justice with other nations, is the greatest, unfortunately also the rarest subject offered in all the breadth and length of history.

In the definitions of civil liberty, which philosophers or publicists have, nevertheless, endeavored to give, they seem to have fallen into one or more of the following errors. Some have confounded liberty, the status of the freeman, as opposed to slavery, with civil liberty. But every one is aware, that while we speak of freemen in Asia, meaning only non-slaves, we would be very unwilling to speak of civil liberty

3 I have dwelt on this subject at length in my Political Ethics.

The ancients knew this

in that part of the globe. distinction perfectly well. There were the Spartans, constituting the ruling body of citizens, and enjoying what they would have called, in modern language, civil liberty, a full share in the government of the polity; there were helots, and there were Lacedæmonian people, who were subject, indeed, to the sovereign body of the Spartans, but not slaves. They were freemen, compared to the helots; but subjects, as distinguished from the Spartans. This subject is very plain, but the confusion has not only frequently misled in times past, but is actually going on to this day in many countries.

Others have fallen into the error of substituting a different word for liberty, and believed that they had thus defined it, while others again have confounded the means by which liberty is secured by some, with liberty itself. Some, again, have been led, unawares, to define something wholly different from civil liberty, while imagining that they were giving the generics and specifics of the subject.

The Roman lawyers say that liberty is the power (authority) of doing that which is not forbidden by the law. That the supremacy of the law and exclusion of arbitrary interference is a necessary element of all liberty, every one will readily admit; but if no additional characteristics be given, we have, indeed, no more than a definition of the status of a non-slave. It does not state whence the laws ought to come, or what spirit ought to pervade them. The same lawyers say: Whatever may please the ruler has the

VOL. I.-4

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