Modern writers, down to a very recent period, have followed the ancients. Declaimers frequently do so to this day; but they show that they do not comprehend modern liberty and civilization. Modern indoor civilization, with all her schools and charities and comforts of the masses, is incalculably dearer than ancient outdoor civilization. Modern civilization is very dear. Yet our liberty requires civilization as a basis and a prop; our progressive liberty requires progressive civilization, consequently progressive wealth-not, indeed, enormous riches in the hands of a few. Antiquity knew, and Asia possesses to this day, such riches in greater number than modern Europe has ever known them.* We stand in need of immeasurable wealth, but it is diffused, widely spread and widely enjoyed wealth, for we stand in need of widely spread and widely enjoyed culture.

To last, to last with liberty and wealth, is the great problem for a state. Our destinies differ from that of brief and brilliant Greece. Let us derive all the benefit from Grecian culture and civilization-from that chosen nation, whose intellectuality and æsthetics, with Christian morality, Roman legality, and Teutonic individuality and independence, form the main elements of the great phenomenon we designate by the term modern civilization, without adopting her evils and errors, even as we adopt her sculpture without that religion whose very errors contributed to produce it.

* Indeed, the enormous treasures occasionally met with in Asia are indications of her comparative poverty.

CHAPTER XXXI.

INSECURITY OF UNINSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENTS. UNORGANIZED, INARTICULATED POPULAR POWER.

THE insecurity of concentrated governments has been mentioned in a previous part of this work. The same may be said of all governments that are not of a strongly institutional character. Eastern despotism is constantly exposed to the danger of seraglio conspiracies, as the centralized governments of the European Continent showed their insecurity in the year 1848. They rocked and many broke to pieces, although there was, with very few exceptions, no ardent struggle, and nothing that approached to a civil war. To an observer at a distance, it almost appeared as if those governments could be shaken by the loud huzzaing of a crowd. crowd. They have indeed recovered; but this may be for a time only, nor will it be denied that the lesson, even as it stands, is a pregnant one.

During all that time of angry turmoil, England and the United States stood firm. The government of the latter country was exposed to rude shocks indeed, at the same period; but her institutional character protected her. England has had her revolution; every monarchy probably must pass through such a period of violent change, ere civil liberty can be largely established and consciously enjoyed by the people-ere government and people fairly understand one another on the common

ground of liberty and self-government. But no fact seems to be so striking in the revolution of the seventeenth century in England as this, that all her institutions of an organic character, her jury, her common law, her representative legislature, her local self-government, her justice of the peace, her sheriff, her coroner-all survived the sanguinary struggle, and then served as the basis of an enlarged liberty. The reason of this broad fact cannot be that the English revolution did not occur in a time of bold philosophical speculation as the French revolution did. The English religionists of the seventeenth century were as bold speculative reasoners as the French philosophers were, and England's religious fanatics were quite as fierce enemies of property and society as the French political fanatics were. It was, in my opinion, preeminently her institutional character in general, or the whole system of institutions and the degree of selfgovernment contained in each, that saved each single institution, and enabled her to weather the storm when she was exposed to the additional great danger of a worthless general government after the restoration. There is a tenacity of life and reproductive principle of vitality exhibited in the whole seventeenth century of British history, that cannot be too attentively examined by the candid statesmen of our family of nations.

It may be objected to my remarks, that Russia too has remained untouched by the attempted revolutions of the year 1848, although her government is a very centralized one. Russia has, in some respects, much of an Asiatic character; and the succession of her monarchs is marked by an almost equal number of palace conspiracies, and imperial murders or imprisonments.

1

The

A London journal said some years ago, with great bitterness, yet with truth-A Russian czar is a highly assassinative substance.

people, on the other hand, have not yet been reached by the political movements of our race. There is in politics, as in all spheres of humanity, such a thing as being below and being above an evil. Many persons that are free from scepticism are not above it, but the fearful questions have never yet presented themselves; and many nations remain quiet, while others are torn by civil wars, not because they are above, but because they are still below revolutions.

"The

Russia may be said, in one respect at least, to furnish us with the extreme opposite to self-government. service," that is, public service, or being a servant of the imperial government, has been raised in that country to a real cult, a sort of official religion. Any infraction of justice, any hardship, any complaint, will be replied to with a shrug of the shoulder, and the words "the service.' The term service, in its present Russian adaptation, is the symbol for the most absolute government, the most passive bureaucracy, and a most automaton-like government played by the czar; and it is thus, as I called it, the extreme opposite to our selfgovernment.

If concentrated governments are insecure, mere unorganized and uninstitutional popular power is no less so; and neither such power, nor mere popular opposition to all government, is a guarantee of liberty. The first may be the reason why all the Athenian political philosophers of mark looked from their own state of things, during and after the Peloponnesian war, with evident favour upon the Lacedæmonian government. Lacedæmon was, indeed, no home for individual liberty; but they saw in Sparta permanent institutions, and, without having arrived at a perfectly clear distinction between an institutional government and one of a tossing absolute market

majority, they may have perceived, more or less instinctively, that neither permanency nor safety is possible without an institutional system. They must have perceived that there was no individual liberty in Sparta; but her institutional character may have struck them, and the contrast may have lent to that government the appearance of substantial value which it did not possess in reality. It seems otherwise difficult to explain why the most reflecting should have preferred a Lacedæmon to an Athens, even if we take into account the general view of the ancients, that individuality must be sacrificed to the state-a view of which I have spoken at the beginning of this work.

As to the second position, that the guarantee of liberty cannot be sought for in mere opposition to government, or in a mere negation of power, it is only necessary to reflect that in such a state of things one of three things must necessarily happen. Either the people are united, and succeed in enfeebling or destroying the government,-in which case, again, the new government has the whole sweeping power, and of course is in turn a negation of liberty, thus substituting absolutism for absolutism; or the people are not united, do not succeed, and leave the government more powerful and despotic than before; or a state of things is brought about in which all power is destroyed-political asthenia. It is a state of political disintegration, leading necessarily to general ruin, and preparing the way for a new, generally a foreign, power, which then rears something fresh upon the ruins of the past-fabrics that are cemented with blood and tears.

There is no other way to escape from the appalling dilemma than to unite the people and government into one living organism, and this can only be done by a