ture, and the legislature itself may be the constitution, which may have ema sovereign will of the people. Yet v of laws or usages an institution unite the idea of an independent ind it. It must have its own distinct cha peculiar action, and it must not owe to the arbitrary mandate of a will Independence does not mean sejuncti If this were not so, we would not s the term institution, and the simple t Ordinance would suffice. Neither the Romans nor the Greeks term for institution; indeed the G 7 The Latin Institutum does by no means ex our word institution. It means a purpose, obj and, finally, a settled procedure, by which it is a certain object; hence a uniform method of act when similar cases occur. Institutum is very conjunction with consuetudo, and often means settled usage with reference to certain cases designates one of the elements of our Institut include the idea of a distinctly limited system with a considerable degree of autonomy, nor d the idea of our enacted institutions. Institutum even distinct words for the Latin jus and lex, a paucity of language which we share with them; and if the Romans had no word for institution, although they had many real institutions, we have many important separate systems of law, such as the law of insurance, of bailment, the maritime law, without having an appropriate term for separate bodies of laws and rules. Nor did the Roman probably feel the want of a word for Institution, for the same reason that he expressed time by saying: "Two hundred years after the founded city." The thing itself, the city, was in his mind. We would say: Two hundred years after the foundation of the city. The foundation of the city, an abstraction, is in our mind. The Roman said Respublica, the Public Thing, and upon this raft of words, strong but coarse, his own political progress and civic life forced him to put a heavy freight of meaning, until it came to designate the vast idea of Commonwealth. The Roman was adverse to abstract terms, Ab usage throughout. Still, it is readily seen how the Roman word institutum was naturally changed and expanded into the modern word Institution. 8 The Roman shunned abstraction even though he should become illogical. He said: In medias res, into the middle things, instead of into the middle of things, and we moderns abstract even against all sense. I read but yesterday in large letters over a shop this word-Carpetings. Here we have first an unmeaning abstraction of a simple and sound word, carpet, and then a plural is made of the more abstract term. The Americans, altogether inclined to use pompous and grandiloquent words, are also given to use these abstract terms or those that approach abstraction far more than the English. The sign of the smallest baker's shop will not be John Smith, Baker, but Bakery by John Smith, perhaps even Ameri stracting was a process at which he was no good hand." The Greeks, however, may have lacked a proper term for the idea Institution, although so ready to abstract, and possessed of a plastic language, which offered peculiar facilities for the formation of abstract terms, while yet the people were characterized by an eminently political temperament, simply because the Greeks were, comparatively speaking, not a tribe of an institutional bias. They were not prone to establish political institutions, and, with the exception of the Dorians, preferred to bring everything under the more or less direct will of the mass. But, although the Greeks abstracted well, and had a language in which they could readily cast any abstraction, it must not be forgotten that they rather restricted their terms of abstraction to philosophical speculation, and in all the other spheres of life and action they manifested the true antique spirit, that of positive reality. Their style and expressions accorded with this bias. can Bakery, or, should it happen to be near the sea, Ocean Bakery. A common shop of a green grocer in the second largest city of the United States calls itself United States Market. The negroes have caught the fever. Not long ago I saw a common shanty erected in a southern forest, to accommodate travellers with coffee while their luggage was ferried over a river, adorned with the following words on a pine board: Jenny Lind and Sontag Hotel. The railway bridge had been carried away, and the café was but for a few days. 9 The best grammarians tell us that Latin nouns ending in io, and adjectives ending in ilis (that is, abstract terms), must be used with circumspection, and not without good authority, since they are comparatively rare in the best writers. This is true, and speaks volumes concerning the Roman character and mental constitution. They might as easily as ourselves have said the Union or the League of the Achaeans, but their word for our union was simply "the whole" (ro xoivov). Few nations have evinced a greater and more constant tendency to build up institutions, or to cluster together usages and laws relating to cognate subjects into one system, and to allow it its own vitality, than the Romans in their better period. The Greeks, as has been observed, were far less an institutional people. There is a degree of adhesiveness and tenacity -a willingness to accumulate and to develop precedents, and a political patience to abide by them— necessary for the growth of strong and enduring institutions, which little agreed with the brilliant, excitable, and therefore changeable Greeks. This was at least the case with the Athenians and all their kindred, and to them belongs the main part of all that we honor and cherish as Grecian. The London Times has called the queen of England an institution. This is rhetorically putting the representative for the thing represented—the queen for the crown, which itself is a figurative expression for the kingly element in the British polity. Nevertheless, the meaning of the assertion that the queen of England is an institution, is correct and British. It originated from a conviction that the monarch of Great Britain is not such by his own individuality, that he is not appointed by a superior power or divine right, but that he enjoys his power by the law of the land, which confines and regulates it. It means that he is the chief office-bearer, or, it may be, the chief emblem-bearer, of a vast institution, which forms an integral part of the still more comprehensive institution called the British government or the state." 9 The reader who desires to become acquainted with the opposite view, must turn to the Christian Politics, by Rev. Wm. Sewell, Fellow and Subrector of Exeter College, London, 1848; a book which carries out the views of Filmer to an extent which that apologist of absolutism never contemplated. It may be fairly considered to occupy the point opposite to that of the most rabid socialist of France; and, according to the rule that we ought to welcome a work which carries its principle to the fullest length, no matter what that principle may be, it is worth the student's while to make himself acquainted with it. If he can get through the whole, however, he is more patient than I found it possible to be. According to Mr. Sewell, there is but one true government, absolute monarchy, demanding absolute obedience; the king makes the state, and the view I have endeavored to prove in my Ethics, that the state, despite of its comprehensive importance, still remains a means to obtain certain ends, is attacked as the opinion of mere "philosophers." The king, the house of lords, and that of the commons, as they ought to be considered, indicate, according to this writer, the relation in which possibly the three persons of the one deity stand. Filmer stopped short at least with Adam. To counteract the revolting effect which may have just been produced, I refer the reader to page 146, where he will find, in a passage of great length, that the Greek at Marathon fought only for his country, his hearth and his laws, while the Persian far surpassed him, because he fought for his king (those also who, according to Herodotus, were whipped into battle?), and that “a christian eye will look with far greater satisfaction and admiration on the Persians, who threw themselves out of the sinking vessel, that by their own death they might save their king, than upon Thermopyla or Marathon." Enough! I should not have alluded to such extravagances and crudities, were not the book a very learned yet illogical apology for a doctrine which many may have supposed to be dead, and did it not occupy, in view of its preposterous theory, the first place of its class. Nor is it historically uninteresting that such a work has been written in the middle of the nineteenth century. So much is certain, that were the English government actually founded upon VOL. I.-29 |
