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THE SHADOW OF CHRISTIANITY
OR
THE GENESIS OF THE CHEISTIAN STATE,
A TREATISE FOR THE TIMES,
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE APOCATA8TA8IS.
Stultum est imperare caeteris qui nescit sibi."
gw f 0*fe :
PUBLISHED BY HUEDv& HOUGHTON,,
Boston ; E. P. BUTTON & Co.
PREFACE
The following treatise was written in the Winter and Spring
of 1862-3, occasioned by a request for contributions to the politi-
cal department of a religious newspaper. But running obstinate-
ly into form and dimensions not suited to that purpose, it was
laid aside with much other spoiled foolscap, where perhaps it
should have been left
The state of the country which suggested the subject and
method of its treatment no longer exists. But the principles and
facts and arguments of the treatise have little peculiar relation to
any one time or one country. Allusions to events as present
which were passing two years ago, and illustrations by condi-
tions and relations of things which have become historical, have
not, therefore, been altered.
The subject is trite to thinking American minds. Perhaps
the method of treating it, and some of the aspects and illustra-
tions of it thereby presented, are not so. Certainly it is one which
has sufficient need of being urged in everyway which can be
made effective, upon the consideration of both thinking and un-
thinking men, and especially of those who aim to be leaders in
politics and statesmanship, men who are not by any means the
most profoundly thoughtful class in the community.
If the treatise shall serve to increase, in the minds of any
such, or of others, a feeling of the desirableness and of the neces-
sity of the influence of Christianity in the State, and the confi-
dence of any in its power to mould the State more and more into
its true form ; if it shall aid, in however small measure, to ex-
tend the application of the principles of Christianity wider and
deeper to the political, industrial and business relations of men,
it will accomplish, so far, what should be the highest aim of
every Christian man and woman the extension of the Kingdom
of God on earth.
Our Christianity has just been subjected to one of the seve-
rest trials to which the religion of a nation was ever exposed.
One short year ago we ourselves and the friends of true Chris-
tianity in all the world trembled lest it should prove unequal to
the occasion. By God's grace it stood the test. Let us, there-
fore, thank God and take courage. If, however, we may justly
be encouraged from the past, we have less reason for self-com-
placency at what has been done than for shame at what is not
done. For to what a small part of the whole field of the rela-
tions of men, as citizens of the State, relations which ought to be
under the control of the principles of Christianity, have they yet
been applied ! Still, therefore, there is need to sow beside all
waters, and since God's coulter has now well broken the field, let
us scatter wide the good seed while the furrows are fresh.
THE SHADOW OF CHRISTIANITY.
CHAPTER I.
THE CHURCH.
" I will give my laws into their understanding, and upon their
heart will I write them." SEPTUAGINT.
" If the Son shall make you free ye shall be free indeed. ' ' J. C.
Christianity attains its earthly realization in those
persons in whom there is such a mutual relation be-
tween spiritual truths and the faculties receptive of
them that they " receive the love of the truth" at
the same time with the knowledge of it, and as the
condition of the true knowledge of it. They have
not only an intellectual relation of assent to the
truth, but that moral correlativeness to the charac-
ter of the truth which makes them capable of recog-
nizing, willingly receiving, and knowing the truth,
that it is truth. It is written on their heart as well
as admitted into their understanding. It is plain
that the relation of such persons to truth as LAW,
or in the form of commands (which is always the
form of spiritual truth) to be obeyed, is the relation
of willing obedience, of free conformity to the law.
6 THE CHU R CH.
They know the truth, and the truth has made them
free. They are free from the relation of slaves to
the false, the base, the sinful, and from that of un-
willing or counterwilling to the true and good.
Spiritual truth always demands that it be believed
and obeyed, and inasmuch as it is addressed to the
spiritual faculties of which the will is the presiding
organ, it demands that it be cordially believed, and
willingly obeyed, freely, that is, without compul-
sion cr even moral constraint. It demands the obe-
dience of the free, willing spirit ; in short it demands
spiritual obedience. Any other obedience in spiri-
tual relations is absurd, contradictory to the idea, and
so ceases to be obedience, so that where the moral
correlation to the truth, and to God the source of it,
is wanting, obedience is impossible. There can con-
sequently be no place for coercion in regard to spiri-
tual obedience. Many truths are impossible to be
known or believed, recognized as true by spiritual
perception, or even admitted into the understanding
in the absence of the requisite moral conditions ;
they must first be "written on the heart." For
how can the proud man come to the knowledge of
that, to know which implies humility? How can the
pharisee make the prayer of the publican ? recognize,
or admit the duty of making such a prayer ? And
so in general, since the true knowledge of the pecu-
liar and most important doctrines of Christianity im-
plies a spiritual preconformity to them, and willing
reception of them, where the moral quality is hetero-
geneous, and the will is averse, such knowledge is im-
possible. It is certain, then, that there must be great
and unreconcilable differences of opinion between
those who hold the relation to spiritual truth which
THE CHURCH. 7
is the condition of knowledge and obedience, and those
who do not. This difference of relation to truth and
consequent duty, is in fact an essential difference and
the most important difference among men.
A community of persons, having such relation to
spiritual truth that they recognize, willingly believe,
and freely obey it as fast and as far as it is pre-
sented to them, associated and organized in order
more and more to know, become conformed to, and
make known religious truth, is a CHURCH. It is
obvious that the Church if constituted according to
the Christian idea, and so as to be truly a COMMUNI-
TY, must consist exclusively of persons having the
relation to religious truth just spoken of. For this
is the essential element of their unity, this is u the
communion of saints," in which, and by which they
are associated and become of the same kind, so that,
of necessity, nothing heterogeneous, in this respect,
can properly be of the community, but must be for-
eign and outward in relation to it.
That which is common to all the members of a
properly constituted church is their moral relation
to the truth when fully presented to the appropriate
faculties. There is not in all respects a common
knowledge, or a common and same amount of know-
ledge. The purpose of the community in regard to
itself is to increase in all its members the knowledge
of the truth, and the performance of the religious
and moral duties always demanded by it. Religious
truths, like other knowledge, are successively acquir-
ed, and in order to the true and full apprehension of
them, there may be necessary both instruction and
exhortation. The church, therefore, needs, in order
to its true ends, certain functions to be performed
8 THE CHURCH.
within it ; and besides the mutual communications
and assistance of its members, the true life, know-
ledge, and duties of the church are best promoted by
certain officers or organs specially devoted to these
ends. The church has also a most important rela-
tion to those not of its own community, to those
without, namely, to proclaim the truth to them ;
for which it must have appropriate organs. It is
manifest that these organs of the church both for in-
ternal and external use, must partake of the common
relation to the truth. They must therefore be evol-
ved from within the church itself; that is, the church,
like all true organisms, is ^self-organized . But the
organific principle, as in the natural world, is the
creative act of God.
The church needs to be instructed, guided, govern-
ed, and the proper officers of the church may teach,
reprove, rebuke, with all authority. But it is plain
that it must be spiritual authority, to be manifested,
and exercised, and legitimated, by so rightly divid-
ing and skillfully presenting religious truth to minds
pre-adapted to its recognition and reception, that the
obligation to believe and obey it shall, by such
minds, be felt and acknowledged. The church by its
peculiar endowment is thus of necessity made the
judge whether its officers do exercise spiritual autho-
rity, and, in general, of their qualifications, as well
as of those of persons asking admission as new mem-
bers to their community, for only those who have
the requisite relation to spiritual truth can determine
whether others partake of the same.
Another fact is obvious here, namely, that the
obedience rendered to the authority exercised in the
church must be spiritual obedience, free, spontan-
TH E CHURCH . 9
ecus, willing obedience, obedience of the will, since
no other obedience is recognized, or satisfies the de-
mand, in spiritual relations but compulsion of the
will is impossible. There can, therefore, be no ef-
fective coercion of spiritual obedience. Certain out-
ward acts may be compelled, but that which was es-
sential to the required obedience is wanting, the act
becomes instantly something else. If any member
of the church carelessly admitted is found not to re-
cognize the truth, nor to admit its claims to his be-
lief and obedience, does not govern himself by the
law written on his heart, the church is powerless to
exact obedience, it can only ask him to leave a com-
munity in which he does not belong.
Thus it appears that the whole constitution and
organization of the church are determined by its pe-
culiar relation to religious truth, a relation every-
where in the New Testament asserted as a fact, and
confirmed by the experience ol all those who partake
of it. From this it results that the church is self-
organizing, the form being but the manifestation of
the idea, as in all other true organisms. Any inter-
ference from without could, evidently, only produce
deformity or monstrosity. All its organs must be
homogeneous with it, and as the church is ultimate
judge of that fact they must be the evolution of its
own life and under its own control. For the autho-
rity of the officers of the church is spiritual authori-
ty, that is, the authority of the truth, but to the
church belongs the endowment of recognizing the
truth, while in any individual member, even per-
haps in the Teacher himself, this endowment might
be found wanting.
The church is also self -legislating. N ot in the
10 THE CHURCH.
sense that it enacts for law its own will this no true
legislature ever does hut its relation to Christian
truth makes it a criterion and interpreter of the laws
of Christ's kingdom, so that it becomes as it were an
Assessor Christi ; and because no earthly power
outside of the church itself may rightfully legislate
for it.
The church is, moreover, self-governing. Not
merely because it is self-legislating, but also because
free obedience to spiritual authority which is the
only authority and the only obedience that can have
place in the church is the most perfect form of
self-government. And this is common to all the true
members of the community, being implied in that
which constitutes them a community. This is also
the most perfect form of freedom. This it is " to be
free indeed," since compulsion is contradictory and
antagonistic to the very idea of the relation.
The church, then, defined according to its idea, is
a self-organizing, self-legislating, self-governing, free
DEMOCRACY.
Such, it is plain, must be, and remain, the form
of the church, if the embody ment truly expresses
the living idea within it, and if the church never for-
gets the true ends of its organization, namely, to
know by moral conformity to it, and to make known,
spiritual truth, even up to that highest height, the
" knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ which is
eternal life."
Eut Christian men, and members of the church
community, even if they are properly such, are only
becoming, and are not yet fully, the new creation
which is to be the end of their progress.
If, therefore, as there is always danger, the spiritual
THECHURCH. 11
in the church, through un watchfulness, and unfaith-
fulness in regard to the conditions of true knowing,
fails to direct and control the conduct of the church,
fails to legislate in the church, two methods of aber-
ration from the true form, and from the true ends
of the church are not only possible, but alas ! how
often have they been actual in all the ages of Chris-
tianity.
I. The first danger arises from the admission of
unspiritual members to the church, those who have
no spiritual relation to the truth. On this point the
very piety of the church is a source of danger to it ;
for nothing is more natural or more proper than that
Christians should rejoice at what they constantly pray
for additions to their number. Their best feelings
here may disturb their judgment, and make them
liable to fall into the common error of believing
what they earnestly desire to find true, rather than
to insist on rigid evidence. Such errors of judg-
ment a few times repeated introduce into the church
a foreign and unassimilated element. This element,
for obvious reasons, tends, always, to increase itself.
The church is no longer a community, it is hetero-
geneous. There is no longer unity but duality.
The church is divided into parties. Soon there will
be a demand that the doctrines of the church be mo-
dified, that the rules for the admission of members
be relaxed that the preacher be exchanged for a
more popular one in order to "build up the church"
Such cases, unhappily, are not extremely rare, so
that we know their results. The unspiritual element,
if not too large, may after infinite trouble be ex-
pelled ; or, which is more usual, the spiritual ele-
ment, weary of contention, which is not to its taste,
12 THECHURCH.
withdraws, going forth empty of all but the truth,
the only possession accumulated by them not desired
by their successors.
II. The second and most disastrous form of aber-
ration is where the church gives up, or is deprived
of its self-legislating power ; for which is substituted
the usurped legislation of its officers, with vary-
ing prerogatives in regard to prescribing their own
functions and appointing their successors. Such a
relation between the church and its officers may be-
come gradually established through the natural hu-
mility and self-diffidence of spiritual men paying
undue deference to the presumed superior qualifica-
tions of others, and especially by imposing upon fa-
vorite teachers functions the exercise of which will
afterwards be claimed as a right by those of a diffe-
rent character. But however this relation may ori-
ginate it not only destroys the unity of the church
but becomes sooner or later a deadly and fatal du-
ality. The church is no longer a community. It
has ceased to be self-organizing for it is no longer
an organism. It is not self-legislating. It is not
self-governed. It is not free. For the clergy by
assuming a position over against, and above the
church, as its governors, instead of being its organs,
thereby claim a peculiar endowment of which the
church does not partake, and thus show themselves
ignorant of the true nature of spiritual authority.
They may, therefore, and will shortly, enact laws
and prescribe doctrines for the church to which no
spiritual obedience can be rendered. The further
natural results of this relation can be easily foretold
were it not that so many historical exhibitions of
them render it unnecessary. It is not essential to
TH E CH UR CH . 1&
my purpose in this introductory chapter to follow
the retrograde development and transformation of
the Christian ministry into a priesthood, and of the
priesthood into a hierarchy ; to point out how the
Christian church becomes a hierarchical State in which
the priests are the governing class and the spiritual
body the subjects ; in which laws } ordinances, dog-
mas, customs, ceremonies are like the legislation of
other aristocratic governments prescribed primarily
for the profit of the governors, but are nevertheless
to be obeyed, if not with spiritual and free obedience
then by persuasion of fire and sword. And other
teachings are not to be tolerated under the same
penalty ; for heresy here is equivalent to treason in
other States.
Thus "God's heritage" becomes the heritage and
inheritance of usurpers who dare to call themselves
God's vicegerents, a heritage so skilfully farmed that
it distributes worldly rank, honors, dignities, emolu-
ments and wealth to its earthly possessors, who
make most profitable merchandise of God's people,
while to the people themselves in proportion as they
have demanded the rights of spiritual men, they have
awarded tyranny, poverty, slavery, dungeons, gib-
bets and stakes. All these results have happened
not by accident, but will always happen in the ab-
sence of strong counteracting causes, as the natural
development of the consequences of the false relation
of the spiritual body to an unspiritual head. Even in
the least developed, and in the most restrained and
coerced forms of this relation, and where there may
be much spiritual life in the head as well as in the
body, the perverting and emasculating influence of
the relation is exhibited not rarely all the way from
14 THE CHURCH.
the pretended Epistles of Ignatius down to the last
episcopal convention.
It is a remarkable proof of the divine energy and
persistence of the spiritual life in the church,
and of the truth of the promises for its protection,
that under the government of Apostolic successors ?
who kept armed retainers of their own, besides con-
troling the whole civil power for the enforcement of
their spiritual authority ! "teaching for doctrine
the commandments of men"; under every form and
degree of oppression ; under however thick incrusta-
tions of superstition ; it has often shaken and lifted
the incumbent masses, and in spite of all repression
has at length come forth, asserting its divine origin
and God-given prerogatives, until it has put its hie-
rarchical enemies with their secular allies everywhere
on the defensive, and at many points has resumed its
full, legitimate, self-legislating, and self-governing
power.
The church, then, rightly constituted, and duly
organized, consists of persons, whether teachers or
taught, governors or governed, who are ready to
yield spiritual obedience to all spiritual truth, and
not only to all spiritual authority and laws of the
church, but also to all civil authority and true laws
of the State, in short to the laws of all their earthly
relations so far as they know or have the means of
knowing them. They are persons in whom are be-
coming realized the highest ends possible for them
as men. In them is attained the true purpose of
God in their creation. The Church is the earthly
SUBSTANCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
CHAPTER II.
THE COMMONWEALTH.
" Certes a shadowe hath likenesse of the thing of which it is
shadowed, but shadowe is not the same thing of which it is
shadowed. ' ' CHAUCER.
" That at the least the shadow of Peter passing by night over-
shadow some of them." Acts of the Apostles.
The church is a community in order to spiritual
ends, for the development of the spiritual life in
men ; , but there is another community indispensable
to the well-being of the natural life of men, the
State. The conditions of this well-being are just
relations relations directed and controlled by the
law of justice of all the members of the communi-
ty, that is, of all the citizens of the State to each
other; and relations of justice, and safety of the
whole Nation, towards all other Nations. Whatever
may be the form of government it is plain that the
ends of the existence of the State as a State imply
that the laws, by whomsoever enacted, must be IN
ORDER TO JUSTICE. Laws therefore cannot originate
in the will and good pleasure of the legislators, be-
cause they existed before the State, ready to demand
16 THE COMMONWEALTH.
obedience whenever and wherever men come into
civil and political relations to each other, just as the
laws of chemistry are always ready to act even in
combinations which never before happened. But the
emblem of justice is the balance, and justice is equal
justice, so that the laws should give, not equal well-
being, but equal opportunities of earthly well-being
to all the citizens of the State, equal rights, p?ivi-
leges, and immunities, in order that each citizen in
proportion to his industry in ihQJust use of the fa-
culties which God has given him, and of the oppor-
tunities which the laws give him, may realize the
ends for which he is a citizen. To diminish or take
wholly away the good of one for the sake of adding
to that of another under the pretence that the good
of the whole is thereby increased, though the prin-
ciple on which some societies are based, is not an ar-
rangement which justice ever prescribes. For to
make a man a mere instrument for the good of ano-
ther, a good of which he is also capable and of which
he is thereby deprived, is not simple injustice, but is
of the very essence of crime, a crime none the less
for its being legal ; for though all LAW, that is,
God's laws are of divine right, the DeviJ's are not of
divine right. This, however, does not anect the
duty of each to make his proportion of sacrifices for
the common welfare. Justice is the essential princi-
ple of order, and of organic health in the State. If
the self-will of the legislators is substituted for LAW,
and elements of injustice are admitted among the
permanent principles of the government, they will
show themselves sooner or later as a leaven of dis-
ease in the body politic ; and however they may have
become intertwined and incorporated with the good ,
TUB COMMONWEALTH. 17
and however blind conservatism conservatism of
evil is always blind may cry out, and give plau-
sible reasons for their preservation, extirpation is the
only possible remedy, the indispensable condition of
attaining the true ends, and even of preserving the
life of the State.
It is plain that the Heal State would be where
the whole people should be. capable of recognizing,
of enacting by appropriate organs, and of willingly
obeying right laws, laws just to all, and at the same
time favoring wise division, and wise mutual rela-
tions of employments, as also just, prudent, and safe
relations to foreign States. But an ideal State is
impossible. For a just State cannot, like the Church,
select for its citizens exclusively such persons as have
the right moral relation to the laws, but must in-
clude all born within its territory, and it would be
quite too much, considering the natural gravitation
of men towards wrong, to expect every one to be
willingly obedient to the right. Yet every citizen
is bound to obey the laws. This is the condition of
the well-being the State aims at, not only for him
but for all others. A community of benefits and
duties is what constitutes the State a COMMON-
WEALTH. It is the communion of the State. At
this point there is another essential difference between
the church and the State. For while the church de-
mands and desires only free spiritual obedience and
can therefore never use any form of coercion, the
State, on the contrary, demands only actual obe-
dience, without regard to motives ; but obedience it
insists on under penalty, and may justly use any ne-
cessary degree of compulsion to enforce it. But al-
though civil justice is satisfied when the laws arc
18 THE COMMONWEALTH.
actually obeyed if even under fear, or infliction, of
penalty, yet the State must ever rejoice in loyalty
and free obedience since so only can its ends be fully
realized. For it is obvious that in proportion as co-
ercion is required, or the power necessary to enforce
obedience must be maintained, not only will the ex-
penses of government, and so the burden of taxes be
increased, but the aims of the law will be often
thwarted, or at best the results will be very imper-
fect in comparison with those of willing and ready
obedience.
It is plain that in proportion as the citizens of
a State hold the relation of intelligent and free obe-
dience to just and equal laws, such a State is a free
State. If moreover the proportion of citizens hold-
ing or ready to hold this relation to such laws is
sufficiently large, the State is, or is capable of be-
coming a Democracy, or what can be the only form
of a Democracy in a large State, a representative
Republic. For the central and essential condition
of a true Democracy is present, that is, the power of
self-government in the sense that, in regard to the
great body of citizens, each is capable of governing
himself, not by making his own will the law, but by
making the law the measure of his will. Such a
people is also capable of asserting its entire freedom,
and right of self-government, whether against an
equal power from without, if it be colonial or pro-
vincial or from within, if it is under any form or
degree of aristocracy. It is an adult community and
has no longer need to be under tutors and governors.
It will also desire and constantly aim at self-govern-
ment because it ought not to be under any other.
It is the right of such a people to be free, since, the
THE COMMONWEALTH. 19
conditions of the proper use of freedom being pre-
sent, so, demonstrably, can the true ends of govern-
ment be best realized ; for it is plain that no earthly
power without or above them could understand and
provide for their proper interests as a community as
well as they themselves. Just as the individual, in
proportion to his intelligence, resents the interference
of others to direct him in his business as absurd as
well as impertinent so an intelligent people are the
best judges and managers of their own affairs. It is,
moreover, the duty of such a people to be free, since
any power over them might, at any time, and indeed
would at all times, as such governments always
have done more or less, interfere to forbid that
which they ought to do, or to require that which
they ought not to do ; and to prevent directly or in-
directly, at least for some of the people, the attain-
ment, and the opportunity of attainment, of some or
all of the ends at which all men and all States are
bound to aim. These results are plainly inseparable
from the very nature of the relation of the governors
to the governed, unless the governors were angels
and not men. And history gives no encouragement
to expect celestial rulers, for "Hero worship" has
proved little other than Devil worship. The highest
rights of a people or of a State are also its highest
duties.
But, it must be remembered that the character of
the people is an indispensable condition of the acqui-
sition and permanent possession of freedom, self-gov-
ernment, and equal laws. For though an oppressed
people, however intellectually or morally degraded,
may in blind rage and fury rise upon, and crush
their oppressors, and proclaim themselves free, yet
20 THE COMMONWEALTH.
by the very law of social gravity they will fall again
shortly under the same or some other form of despot-
ism. Tn order to the successful assertion and main-
tenance of freedom it is evident not only that the
physical force of the people must be superior to that
of the aristocracy, but also that there must be in-
telligence enough to combine and wield that force
efficiently. It is, moreover, evident that in order to
successful self-government there must be in the
people an intelligence capable of recognizing and
enacting the laws of justice as the fundamental prin-
ciples of the government. The true ends of a State
must be not only apprehended, but comprehended
in all its legislation. For only the laws of order in-
sure permanence, and justice is the only order. In-
justice is always essentially chaotic and disorganiz-
ing. The common well-being must be ever kept in
sight, and the laws must constitute the State a COM-
MONWEALTH.
Besides the intelligence necessary to a successful
Democracy, there must be, it is obvious, such a mo-
ral relation to the laws that there shall be paid to
them free, voluntary obedience ; for self-government
by coercion is a contradiction. This, however, is not
to be hoped for from every citizen, nor is it necessary.
But there must be an efficient majority ready both
to obey the laws, and to insist on and enforce obe-
dience to them. This moral relation to the laws, at
least in a large proportion of those who hold it, must
be more than a mere calculation of self-interest, for
this may often seem to be wanting. There must
therefore be a true feeling of the obligations of Duty,
for it is certain that the bare knowledge of the right
is not sufficient to indu^e men to obey it. This cha-
THE COMMONWEALTH. 21
racteristic of the self-governing citizen is in some re-
spects much more important than that of intelli-
gence. For it cannot but happen, considering men's
present intellectual and moral imperfection, that the
consequences of some false elementary principles in
the State will appear in the form of more or less
practical wrong and organic derangement, in which
case duty will always be found more ready to recog-
nize the evil, and much less conservative of it under
the persuasions of self-interest, than any mere know-
ledge of the wrong, however perfect it may be, or
might be. In fact, evils which pay well and involve
the interest of many parties never disappear simply
because their existence is acknowledged, but yield
only to vigorous and repeated attacks of duty, duty
which bows to the supreme authority of right, and
is for the State the only reliable principle of true
progress, since knowledge in the hands of self-inter-
est and present convenience is fond of compromises
and the application of expediency even to organic
laws ; a deadly conservatism ! for expediency and
a choice of methods belong only to the way in which
the fundamental laws are to be carried out, to rules
and statutes derived from these laws, but have no
?lace in regard to the fundamental laws themselves,
n the ten thousand varying relations of material in-
terests there is ample room for the exercise of judg-
ment and intelligent discretion in order to determine
the best methods of realizing the great ends of the
State, but in regard to these ends themselves there is
no room for discretion. Mere intelligence could never
discover these, neither can it preserve them.
It is undeniable that the greater the number of
truly Christian men among the citizens of the State
22 THE COMMONWEALTH.
the larger will be the infusion in it of the essential
element of Duty. For the relation of these men to
truth and right, that is, to LAW, is always that of
free obedience. They are, therefore, capable of true
self-government, and are the most valuable consti-
tuents of the State. Because a self-governing Dem-
ocracy is not an aggregation of individuals every one
of whom is a law to himself and a different law from
that of his neighbor, as aristocrats pretend to believe,
but a community, as a whole, obedient, and exacting
obedience to the law of the common good. Truly
Christian men are also sensitive of wrong, and in pro-
portion to their numbers tend to eliminate it from
all laws, relations and customs. But besides the
more direct effects of Christianity by means of those
in whom its own highest ends are being realized, its
incidental influences, where it is truly taught, are
very great, even over those who deny the authority
of the power that more or less constantly guides and
restrains them. It is, according to the promise of its
Author, both light and salt, and pervading like the
atmosphere, and everywhere diffused through the
community, an ever present overshadowing influence
incessantly demanding in the deepest consciousness
of men and so tending, however slowly, to produce,
in all human relations, conformity to its principles.
It awakens a true reverence for man as man, and a
deeper sense of duty both to God and to men than
ever existed without it. It demands, therefore, worthy
aims and forms of well-being for man, and for all
men, both for body and mind. It represents that
which is common to all men as so infinitely greater
than that in which they differ, that the differences
disappear, and in the presence of Christianity " all
THE COMMONWEALTH. 23
men are equal." Hence it claims for all men and
makes its claims felt in a Christian community how-
ever they may be resisted rights, privileges, op-
portunities and conditions of well-being befitting
creatures made in the image of God and capa-
ble of being restored to it. Under such influences
the common intellect is stimulated, demands and re-
ceives education, the common conscience is quickened,
and that moral sense of duty and responsibility which
has its roots in Christian teaching becomes the most
reliable of all the conditions of free self-governing
obedience to the laws of the State.
A community so interpenetrated by the light and
salt of Christianity that it is capable of organizing it-
self into a State for the true ends of a State ; of
evolving its own legislative organs competent and
willing to enact just and equal laws for all, laws
which can never conflict with the " Higher Law,"
because they are one with it ; ready by an efficient
majority to render willing obedience to such laws,
and at all times to uphold their executive organs in
enforcing obedience to them ; desiring only just and
honorable foreign relations ; providing the conditions
of Earthly well-being for MEN, that is, for intellec-
tual as well as material wants ; protecting its central
life, its self-governing power, by providing for and
requiring universal education, and a wise encourage-
ment of true Christian influences ; such a community
is THE SHADOW OF CHRISTIANITY. It is the coun-
terpart and " likcnesse" of the true Church, though
but a shadowy and far off likenesse, for " shadowe
is not the same thing of which it is shadowed." It
is also a true though imperfect Democratic State. It
is a true Unity, for the government and governed
24 THE COMMONWEALTH.
are one. It is a true COMMONWEALTH, for the good
it realizes is offered equally to all.
Such a self-organizing, self-governing and free
State, though it may still contain much unassimilat-
ed and crude material, is yet, if faithful to itself, a
true, self-realizing idea, tending always towards, but
never attaining to complete realization of itself until
the promise of God is fulfilled that His Laws shall
be written on the heart of all men.
A community, however, somewhat less qualified
than that just described may prove to be a true and
successful Democracy if only the true moral element
in the character of its people is present. It may
contain much unfit material, its statutes or customs
may not preserve the just balance of interests, and
even some of its organic laws may be the latent seeds
of corruption and disorder. But a Democracy is by
the very nature of its organization self -educating.
It is constantly under the teaching of its own expe-
rience. It soon finds that part of its population which
is ignorant or vicious an annoyance, an impediment
and an instrument of evil in the hands of evil men.
It will therefore seek -to diminish this incompatible
element by providing instruction for all its citizens.
It will use all efficient influences to remove both the
ignorance and the vice. Here is its first danger,
that through lack of watchfulness it will permit the
crude and the false materials within it to increase ;
viz., blind but strong ignorance at one extreme, and
unprincipled intellect at the other ; for these are the
constituents of despotism. The State will escape this
danger, however, so long as the great central body
of the people are fit constituents of it.
The equilibrium of employments and interests will
THE COMMONWEALTH. 25
commonly maintain itself without serious collisions,
except that the seductions of foreign commerce, liable
to interfere with true independence by preventing
development and production of what may at any
time become indispensable to the safety of the State ;
and the stimulus of foreign but uncertain markets
liable to produce excess and so derangement of ma-
nufactures, must be carefully guarded against. For
danger or great inconvenience and injury are more
likely to arise from foreign commercial than politi-
cal relations.
But the severest trial of the Democracy will be
where some false principles have failed to be exclud-
ed, or some true ones have failed to be inserted, in
the enactment of fundamental laws. For the natural,
and ultimately the inevitable consequence will be the
existence of wide spread and deeply interwoven self-
interests inconsistent with the common interest, in-
consistent with justice, and so with order and per-
manent harmony. There will be, ultimately, not a
mere diversity but an antagonism of interests which
cannot fail to come into collision. But the assertion
of ancient, legal, or customary, but unjust claims in
which many have come to have an interest backed
with wealth accumulated by the injustice, this con-
test against the right is, of all possible influences in
a community, the most demoralizing. Nothing but
the sternest and most self-denying patriotism and
loyalty to right will be found sufficient to resist and
to remove the evil, and eradicate the causes of it.
Thus a particular democratic experiment may
fail through misorganization in the beginning, or lack
of moral element in the end. But DEMOCRACY has
not thereby failed. If in any case, through ignorance
3 .
THE COMMONWEALTH
or moral imperfection the causes of disease were not
avoided, or the self-recuperative power proved insuf-
ficient, the next Democracy will have the benefit of
the experience of its predecessor.
CHAPTER III.
THE NATURAL STATE. THE DUALITY.
" Now this in thenature of it is nothing but aliud extraaliud t
and therefore perfect alterity and disunity."
" They judge of things according to their own private appe-
tites, and selfish passions, and not with a free uncaptivated uni-
versality of mind, and an impartial regard to the good of the
whole. '*
The true, permanently successful Democracy, the
Unity of government and governed, the truly self-
governing, self-realizing State, the true Common-
wealth, can exist only as an incident of Christianity,
only when profoundly penetrated with both the lignt
and the salt of Christianity.
The natural relation of barbarian men to each
other is like that of animals the strong dominate
over the weak. This they do, not primarily from
the mere love of domination, as animals do not, but
in order to some material benefit to themselves.
They covet something in possession of the weaker
which their superior strength enables them to de-
prive him of. The moving power here is the pur-
pose of having without personal obedience to the na-
tural laws of acquisition. It is more agreeable to
THE PAGAN STATE.
make others their instruments to this end. Although
an obscure instinct of justice sometimes appears in
such relations, it exercises no restraint, might is
practically acknowledged to give right, successful
robbery and piracy are reckoned honorable, and the
plunderer is held in much higher estimation than the
plundered. The social instincts and affections have
no control over this natural combination of laziness
and acquisitiveness when in possession of superior
strength, hence the women of barbarians are the me-
nials, the labor-saving tools of the men. This very
important method of acquisition is applied not only
to the women but to the weak and dependent men of
the barbarian tribe, at least in those above the hun-
ter stage. Thus there are two sources of material
possessions for the strong to plunder from those
who have anything to be deprived of, and to coerce
the muscles of those who have not. But in every
stage of society advanced beyond the merest chaotic
elements this greater strength will be found to rest
on superior intelligence not the wise intelligence
which aims rationally at right ends, but that more
developed animal craft which seeks successfully the
ends which instinct prescribes. This intelligent
strength combined with the wealth it has accumu-
lated is Power. Whoever investigates carefully the
necessary conditions of the accumulation of material
wealth, that is, of available wealth in forms adapted
to immediate use, and considers its relations to hu-
man muscular labor, and the fact that the muscular
labor of the individual can produce very little more
than enough to supply his own necessities, will find
that the human instruments of large accumulations
of wealth must be greatly more numerous than the
THE PAGAN STATE. 29
possessors. It will appear that poverty is the na-
tural correlative of wealth, the indispensable condi-
tion of it. The power, therefore, or might of the
barbarian or semi-barbarian into which wealth enters
as so large an element is derived from the many who
are both the source and the subjects of it.
Here, then, we have the elements, and the natural
origin of aristocratic power. We may say its neces-
sary origin, since, the causes and conditions being
given, the result could be nothing else. According-
ly we find that the earliest stationary societies of
men uniformly consist of chieftains surrounded by a
few armed retainers, and many slaves, or laborers
equally dependent, because the chiefs have monopo-
lized the sources of food and raiment, and can take
such proportion of the products of their labor as they
choose. Here too we have the origin of a natural
and necessary DUALITY, for there is an evolution of
the society into two parties whose interests are an-
tagonistic to each other.
If we suppose one of these chieftains to conquer,
or to make tributary to him several others, to as-
sume supremacy under the name of King and so to
constitute a Nation, which has been commonly the
next step, all the relations of the parts will remain
essentially the same, except that the higher the su-
perstructure the heavier the weight which rests upon
the foundation.
With such estimation of humanity, such self-esti-
mation as men have, and with such practical sense of
justice as exists in the absence of Christianity this re-
lation of the extremes of society would seem to be r
necessarily, a permanent one. There is nowhere any
tendency to its termination. For either the lower
30 THE PAG AN STATE.
extreme must spontaneously elevate itself by acquir-
ing so much intelligence as will enable it to combine
and wield its physical force successfully against the
aristocracy, and to constitute itself a society which
would not again fall into the same relations ; or else
the governing class must, of mere philanthropy, be-
stow upon it rights and privileges which would de-
prive themselves of the most cherished of their own.
But the lowest stratum in a pagan State, for the
most part field laborers, workers in mines, manufactur-
ing operatives, are hardly one remove from the
brutes, most like caged animals, themselves in fact
often chained together, chained to their employment,
made to serve the purpose of water power in the
tread-mill, or sailors chained to the oar. Sunk in
the most hopeless mental and moral apathy, with no
conscious worth, or consciousness of rights as men,
they can only sometimes break forth with a sort of
animal rage and blind fury against their keepers and
oppressors, destructive enough, it may be, for a time,
but without any ultimate aim, or any ultimate result
for their benefit. If they could succeed in wholly
extirpating the antagonist aristocracy, they would,
again, after a longer or shorter period of anarchy,
fall into the same natural and necessary duality.
It is plain, therefore, that, if this duality is to ter-
minate, it must be by influences from above and not
from below, from the governing and not from the
subject class. But to the governing class the relation
is every way advantageous. It furnishes for them
wealth and power, the means of ease, pride, luxury,
distinction, glory, possessions which most men gladly
acquire, but few willingly deprive themselves of.
There are but two motives supposable which could
THE PAGAN STATE. 31
induce the upper class to share either their wealth or
their power with the producers of them so as to make
the State in any sense a Corawio/i-wealth.
I. Fear might do it. But this implies an intelli-
gent, more and more imperative demand from below
backed by the show of an organizable force superior '
to their own conditions which it has been shown
can never exist in the case supposed.
II. A profound sense of justice, a true estimate of
the worth of man as man, a strong practical convic-
tion that the power imposes the obligation to furnish
for men the conditions of well-being and self-realiza-
tion according to the design of the Creator this
state of mind in a pngan aristocracy would in due
time transform the duality into a Community. To
one in the least acquainted with the uniform moral
character and spirit of heathen power could anything
be imagined more ridiculous than such a supposi-
tion? The highest moral attainment even of the
philosophers is expressed in the confession " video
meliora proboque, deteriora sequor" (I see and ap-
prove the right, and practice the wrong.) They ack-
nowledge that the temptations to abuse power and
"Wealth are stronger than human nature can resist
an opinion which the conduct of heathen possessors
of them have always most effectually confirmed.
What hope could there be of political justice where
the private and social morality of the highest ranks
and of all ranks was such as no Christian ears can
tolerate the description of, such that the existence of
it would be incredible were it not everywhere allud-
ed to as a matter of course, and without disapproval,
in pagan literature. It is certain, then, that no
moral causes could change the relation of the gov-
32 THE PAGAN STATE.
eminent to the governed, neither consciousness of
rights from below, nor conscious obligation from
above.
But a high degree of intellectual development,
and of aesthetic cultivation may exist without Chris-
tianity. May not these gradually pervade all classes,
and by producing intellectual community diminish
and finally destroy political inequality ? There is no
tendency towards such intellectual community. For,
on the one hand, the intellect of ignorant men does
not move spontaneously except under circumstances
of physical comfort and hope, and in the absence of
other compulsory or necessary exhausting activities.
Under the depression of excessive muscular labor,
and hopeless deprivations, nothing but strong moral
impulses can excite it to activity. But here the ig-
norance is more profound than can be conceived by
a Christian mind, the oppression of the physical powers
the most grinding, and the absence of moral stimulus
total. It is true that the practice of enslaving pri-
soners of war in ancient times brought some intelli-
gent and educated men into the subject class. But
these immediately became valuable house-servants,
had no connection with, and did not at all affect the
character of the great mass of productive laborers.
There cannot, therefore, be for the lower class any
intellectual se//-elevation and approach towards
equality with the higher ; for the indispensable con-
dition of this is the previous absence of the very re-
lation which the intellectual development is supposed
capable of removing.
On the other hand, there can be none but moral
motives which should induce the upper class to ex-
tend their own cultivation downwards, and these have
THE PAGAN STATE. 33
been shown not to exist. If there were any danger
of a natural gravitation of intelligence, their most
important interests, as well as vanity and pride of
caste would urge them to prevent it, for there is al-
ways, in dual States, a most sensitive distinction be-
tween things liberal and things servile, or, where
legal slavery is wanting, between things noble and
things base and mechanical. But learning and the
arts are everywere liberal. There was, however,
no necessity for ancient aristocracies to forbid the
descent of liberal acquirements as there is in some
Christian States. There was never any danger felt
that the servile class would for themselves take to
learning ; they were hardly thought capable of being
taught. That such danger would have been care-
fully guarded against is shown by the fact that such
concert as the most animal-like savages are capable of
often caused great trouble and destruction, insomuch
that it was advised to place slaves of different lan-
guages together in order to increase the difficulty of
their combination. There would seem, therefore, to
be no possible way in which the requisite common
intelligence, supposed sufficient to terminate the dual
relation, could be realized.
But did not both the Greek and Roman people
acquire intelligence sufficient to enable them to com-
bine successfully against their kings and tyrants, and
assert their own freedom and self-government ? The
Greek and Roman PEOPLE belonged to the aristo-
cratic side of the Duality. They were the armed re-
tainers, and free companions of the original chief-
tains, the instrument of their power. They were
few in comparison with the great subject mass of
servi, coloni, oikefce, penestce, helotce, and other
34 THE PAG AN STATE.
producing and servile classes under whatever names.
Their success was but the success of a band of rob-
bers quarreling as usual over the division of their
common plunder. They were not at all less disposed
to the abuse of power than the more condensed form
of aristocracy. Indeed those who had the best means
of estimating the characters of the two, that is, by
experience of them, represent the "TYRANNY" as
a beast with one head, and the " DEMOCRACY" as a
many headed and much more dreadful beast than
the other. There was here no approach to the idea
of a Community, a Commonwealth, an organism in
which all should partake of a common life, and of a
common nourishment and well-being. Even the
philosophers, who in their (Jespair of existing govern-
ments indulged in day-dreams of ideal States, never
conceived of a political UNITY. Their highest Ideal
was a small superstructure of more or less democratic
aristocracy resting upon a wide foundation of menial
and subject classes. So total was the ignorance and
the depravity of the many, and so profound was the
ignorance of the few in regard to the true estimate of
MAN, that they would no sooner have thought of ad-
mitting men, as such, than animals, to political
rights. To prepare them for such admission would,
from their point of view, have been as absurd as for
the farmer to make his horses judges of the amount
of labor they should perform for him. Notwith-
standing the words virtue, justice, right, were often
in their mouths, so deep was the often unconscious
conviction that right is based upon power, so total in
them the principle of seZ/'-interest, that they felt no
more hesitation and no more compunction in making
MEN mere instruments to their ends, than in using
THE PAGAN STATE. 35
any other tools within their reach and adapted to
their purpose.
But would not a greater amount of intelligence,
a scientific knowledge of the laws of Nature and of
true political economy, such as we possess, and per-
haps a little more, have enabled them to see that
"self-love and social are the same" ; and to be con-
vinced that their true self-interest required them to
share the good that the State can be made to pro-
cure with all its people ? If this were true in re-
gard to earthly well-being considered exclusively,
and by itself, which it is not, then a community of
men of pure intellect, and perfectly developed by a
knowledge of all the laws of their relations to nature
and to each other, but passionless, so as never to
desire other than their true earthly good such a
community might operate like a community of ani-
mals governed by instinct, or, so far as the result is
concerned, like a manufacturing machine in which
all the parts are in order and exactly adapted to the
required end. But if we consider, for example, the
origin of material wealth, and the uses which make
its possession desirable for a being of combined intel-
lect and passion, would it be better for the ^(/"-inte-
rest of every man, in relation to this world alone,
never to misappropriate to himself what justly be-
longs to another ? Or, if it were so, could every
man be practically convinced of it except by taking
the element of passion and pride out of him ? Men,
therefore, such as men are, could never, by any de-
gree of mere intellectual knowledge possible to be ac-
quired in relation to their earthly self-interest form
a permanent community. For it would be for the
actual and true earthly self-interest of some to be
36 THE PAGAN STATE.
rich by making others poor, of some to be learned by
keeping others in ignorance, of some to acquire un-
just power and to use it unjustly, and so of other
things. Intelligent mere earthly self-interest, with
the necessary inequality of intellect among actual
men, must lead inevitably to duality and not to uni-
ty in the State. But in regard to the future life too
little is known in the absence of Christianity to per-
mit the existence of any intelligent self-interest in
relation to the whole of human existence; or of any
motives derived from the consideration of it which
should practically influence men in regard to their
character and conduct in this life. No kind or de-
gree, then, of mere intellectual development, and in-
telligent self-interest could ever have transformed the
Athenian Democracy, or any other pagan duality into
a true self-governing, self-realizing COMMONWEALTH.
But there is still another method, to some men
perhaps hopeful, of attempting to realize the true
State. Might not a far advance in physical science,
increasing man's control over the powers of Nature,
and his facilities for acquiring material wealth, by
giving him a knowledge of law, order and method,
added to a high degree of aesthetic cultivation, a
contemplation and admiration of beauty, harmony
and fitness in Nature and Art might not these and
other such like influences resulting from the full in-
tellectual and aesthetic developement of men awaken
in them a love of moral beauty, harmony and fit-
ness, that is, of righteousness and justice, and so sti-
mulate the sense of duty and moral obligation which
is latent in all men that moral impulses would in-
duce them to attempt and accomplish what no con-
siderations of present or ultimate self-interest how-
THIS PAGAN STATE. 37
ever enlightened would be found sufficient for ? These
influences are much trusted in some quarters, by many
reckoned superior to those of Christianity.
As to the effect of scientific knowledge there
would seem to be no necessary connection between
the knowledge of a law of physical Nature and a dis-
position to be just in one's dealings with his fellow-
men. They are apparently things different in kind
without sympathy or natural relation. Why should
the merchant whose knowledge of astronomy, sea
currents, and mete orology enable him to sail all seas
with greater safety and more speed than others be
less crafty and over-reaching in his contracts, or less
fond of unfair profits than they ? Is the man who
can make the lightnings his messengers in negotiat-
ing less likely to be of grasping and gambling char-
acter than he who does his business by the mail-
coach ? The manufacturer whose control of the
powers of nature enables him to perform the labor of
thousands of men does he never oppress those whom
he still finds it necessary to employ ? And so in
general is it found that the greater the knowledge
and efficient control of Nature, the greater, in those
who possess this knowledge and power, the develop-
ment of moral integrity and the sense of justice?
Or, rather, does not this knowledge often degenerate
into a true sacrilegious MAGIC, a coercion of the
powers of Nature, which are of themselves spontane-
ously obedient to the will of God, to become instru-
ments of unjust and wicked purposes ; and men, like
the Titans of old, turn rebellious against Heaven in-
stead of becoming more benevolent to men. The
greater powers available for the production of wealth
expand in the same proportion with the desire of acquisi-
38 THE PAGAN STATE.
tion. and there is the same temptation as before to
unjust gain, to seize by the stronger hand or stronger
brain the product of the labor of others.
But the study and appreciation of the ideal, the
fine arts, it is said, are civilizing, humanizing, refin-
ing. What may be the amount and the worth of the
instruction and influence to be derived from these
arts in the hands of those whose moral character is
already such as it is assumed that they always tend
to produce is not here the question. But this, what
is the moral power of such ideals as are the produc-
tion of men in the absence of Christianity, and the
standard of whose own morality is the heathen
standard ? Would the exhibition of ideal Strength
naturally increase the moral strength of the behold-
er ? or would it simply make him critical in regard
to the "points" of a prize-fighter, and awaken the
desire to see an exhibition of his muscles. Ideal
manly Beauty would it stimulate pagan minds to
attempt the realization of a moral ideal in which
there should be left no blot of private wrong, or pub-
lic injustice ? Female ideal Beauty, The Venus
would the study of it excite such deep admiration of
immaculate purity that men would be ready, almost,
to vow eternal virginity ? Could Music so attune
the entire man to harmony that henceforth he would
tolerate in himself no moral discord ? Doubtless
these arts are capable of giving a high degree of en-
joyment, pleasure, both innocent and depraved, and
what use was made of them anciently for the latter
purpose, Pompei bears witness. If they could be
restrained to their better purpose they would furnish
to their cultivators elegant enjoyment, most agree-
able self-indulgence. But what generic connection
THE PAGAN STATE. 39
exists between this or any other self-indulgence or
elegant pleasure, and the self-denials often inele-
gant, painful, and severe, which duty never hesitates
to prescribe as often as they are necessary to the
ends of Right. In the case under consideration, the
transformation of a dual State into a Common-
wealth, would the moral influence of Esthetics be
sufficient to make an imperative demand, a demand
not to be resisted, that the possessors of the wealth,
power, and rank in the State, should share them with
their inferiors, and deprive themselves forever of the
means of re-acquiring them ? An influence which
should make proud, luxurious heathen masters will-
ing to submit to long self-denials in order to instruct,
elevate and fit for self-government their very slaves,
knowing at the same time that their own exclusive
power and profit must as a consequence cease?
These were " fine arts" indeed ! ! magical, miracu-
lous ! Did they, in Athens, where a full and com-
plete experiment of them was made, produce any
such effects ? A sufficient answer may be found in
the decrees more unjust than any single headed
tyranny could conceive of the Athenian Assem-
blies, every member of which could pass critical
judgment upon the last work of Art, or rebuke the
rhetoric of Demosthenes. Not only were the ancient
fine arts powerless for moral good, but such as they
are and always must be in the absence of Christiani-
ty they are among the most efficient instruments of
moral depravity.
We may conclude, therefore, confidently, that
there are no causes in existence in the pagan or na-
tural State, moral, gesthetical, intellectual, or from
the combination of all these, which could ever trans-
40 THE PAGAN STATE.
form it from its natural and necessary duality into a
truly self-governing Community.
But, further, a Community consisting exclusive-
ly of the aristocratic moiety, without the servile
basis of the pagan State, and of the best aristocratic
material which paganism is capable of producing, to
which might be added a knowledge of modern phy-
sical science, organized after any ancient actual or
ideal model, any modern, or any other model, would
be incapable of permanent existence as a self-govern-
ing Community. In the absence of the servile basis
two causes of disintegration would immediately begin
to operate. First The necessity which always ex-
ists in a dual State, of close union among all the
elements of the aristocratic class in order to self-de-
fence against danger from the greatly superior phy-
sical force below them, would be taken away. The
distinct organic powers of the State, whatever their
functions, would be so many separate organisms each
having its own self-seeking life. And, however
skillfully they might have been originally balanced,
in the absence of the bond of fear from below, and of
that of duty from above, in the absence of a common
moral life such as Christianity alone can give, their
equilibrium could not be preserved. The question
must first be solved, to which no pagan people could
ever find an answer, c l quis custodiet ipsos custo-
des ?" Who shall watch the sentinels ? The philo-
sophers asserted that morality must be the guardian
of the State, but acknowledged at the same time
that it was beyond the strength of men under the
temptations of wealth and power to obey its laws.
Such possessors of power, surrounded by depraved
men, would inevitably find means to retain it for
THE PAGAN STATE. 41
their own ends instead of those of the Community,
and the larger power would as certainly control the
smaller as the heavier weight disturbs the equili-
brium of the balance.
But another and still greater danger to the Unity
of the State would arise from the absence of the ser-
vile class. The relations of all the citizens to the
first necessaries of life, and to wealth as the means
of many gratifications, would be changed. They
would be their own producers. Instead of extorting
the means to realize their most cherished aims from
the muscles of a dependent caste, the contest must
now be between themselves. The desire of large
wealth and the ends for which it is sought would be
the same as before, and the strong wills and the
strong brains would certainly succeed in acquiring it.
But wealth necessarily implies poverty, for the la-
bor of an individual, as said before, is equal to little
more than the supply of his daily necessities. If there-
fore one has more than the product of his own labor
some other or others must have less, if much more,
many others must have less, if there is a large accu-
mulation of wealth great numbers must have thus
contributed to it. Thus, as wealth became accumu-
lated in the hands of the comparatively few, soon the
natural sources of wealth, in the absence of moral re-
straint, would be monopolized in spite of legal prohi-
bitions ; for in such circumstances wealth controls
law, and power and wealth as naturally flow togeth-
er as two drops of water run into each other. By
means of this alliance and monopoly and the contin-
ued competition for wealth the excluded many would
be deprived of larger and larger proportions of the
product of their labor. Then comes excessive pover-
42 THE PAGAN STATE.
ty and consequent ignorance ; on one side an aristo-
cracy of wealth and power; on the other a large de-
pendent producing class, and the Community has
disappeared, the Duality is restored as before.
None of the results exhibited in this chapter are
accidental, but natural and necessary developments
from the character and mutual relations of the act-
ors. Accordingly they have been essentially uni-
form in all pagan States. Always the same despot-
ism of the comparatively few deriving wealth and
power from, and exercising its oppressions upon the
subject and servile masses on which it rests. Whe-
ther it be a single despot and millions of slaves, or
a two-headed, or many-headed beast of the same
species, everywhere it enacts the same inexorable
fundamental law the limit of right is power.
Whether the power is to be exercised over subject
towns, provinces, kingdoms, or dependent men of
whatever names, the end is always the self-interest
of the governors, the good of the governed never.
So far from there being in these heathen aristocra-
cies any tendency towards self-amelioration and
adaptation to the true end of the State, the common
good, on the contrary their inherent vice, and seeds
of disintegration are ultimately destructive of their
own. Their first developement is towards wealth
and power, and in consequence of these, or rather
by means of these, in the absence of all efficient
moral restraint, towards luxury, vice, indolence,
effiminacy, cowardice, vanity, ostentation, until the
ever increasing demand, and competition for wealth
presses intolerably upon the masses below which are
the source of it, they react with destructive fury
upon their now degenerate masters, or they become
THE PAGAN STATE. 43
an easy prey to less degenerate neighbors. In either
case there is but a new arrangement of elements, to
assume gradually the same form, and to repeat es-
sentially the same process. From barbarism to self-
destructive civilization ; and from civilization back to
barbarism. This is the natural, inevitable, and end-
less cycle of pagan development always returning in-
to itself.
If Art, Literature, Science, have been incidents
of the development, they, mostly, in their spirit and
uses, do not give, but take the character of their
period, and so become, on the whole, promotive of
corruption and decay rather than preventive of them.
For what are these when not originating in, and
subservient to " The Good," but instruments of in-
justice, darkness and depravity ?
Thus in every possible aspect of a pagan State its
power to realize the true ends of a State is found to
be absolutely wanting, its character in this respect is
utterly helpless and hopeless.
It is plain that the essential and fatal defect in the
character of the pagan State, is the absence of a
comprehensive and efficient morality. The heathen
morality was but a feeble light in the conscience, but
rarely admitted into the will. It shone upon the
darkness, which however desired not to receive, but
to exclude it. It was too weak to control relations
where its right to do so was acknowledged, and innu-
merable relations which it ought to have governed
were hardly, or not at all, suspected to come within
its province. No kind or degree of knowledge of
physical laws could remove, or tend to remove this
defect in regard to moral laws. For what physical
law is that the knowledge of which would convince
44 THE PAGAN STATE.
a man, for example, of the injustice of slavery, or
imperatively command him not to practice it ? It
was not more or better Taste that was wanting. For
what appreciation of artistic and literary beauty
could successfully urge its admirers, at the cost of
any necessary self-denial, to instruct the ignorant,
to reform the vicious, and to cease from all profitable
wrongs by restoring their rights to those whom they
had deprived of them ? The utter imbecility or per-
version of the sense of relative justice in its contest
with selfishness was a deadly disease in the very life-
blood of the pagan State. Everywhere, in all social,
civil, political and business relations, besides direct
lawless or legal oppressions, justice was ignored or
habitually failed through fraud, the power of the
wrong doer, the defects of the law, or the venality of
those who administered it. To which if there be ad-
ded the frightful depravity of private life among all
classes we may see how far such a State was from
being capable of realizing the true ends of a State ;
and shall have, at the same time, a measure of the
light and salt of Christianity which must permeate
the whole corrupted mass in order to transform it in-
to a successful self-governing Unity and true Com-
monwealth. The more we examine the subject in
its principles, and in all their illustrations in history
the more we shall be convinced that the true State
can exist only as an incident of Christianity ; and on-
ly by a deeply pervading influence of its purifying,
quickening and controling power.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. THE TRANSFIGURATION.
Magnus ab integro ssecloruin nascitur ordo.
lam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto,
* * * * quo ferrea primum
Desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea rnundo.
Aspice venture loetantur ut omnia saeclo !
Another period- conies, new order reigns,
A gentler power from Heaven on Earth descends,
Oppression's iron hand shall cease its sway,
And Justice raise aloft her golden scales.
See, all things gladden at the coming change !
Christianity, always, and in every country in
which it exists, indirectly aims, and tends constant-
ly to remove the natural duality of the State, and to
mould it into the form of the true self-governing
Democracy, or representative Republic; and will
ultimately realize this aim in all States.
These are very lofty pretensions, and it may be
demanded of Christianity as it was once demanded
of the Author of it in the exercise of the like " By
what authority doest thou these things, and who gave
thee this authority?" By spiritual authority, a
46 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
living, active, ever aggressive and progressive power
not "a stationary agent," a dead morality bor-
rowed from paganism, as its enemies assert. An
authority, a power which cannot be better denned
than it was by Him who is the source of it, as
" leaven" pervading the whole mass in which it is
placed ; a seed, small at first, but by its inherent life
to become a great tree ; a Divine Power conducting
men to a knowledge of " the whole truth/' and able
to convict and convince them, with imperative au-
thority, in regard to " sin," in regard to "right-
eousness," and in regard to a "judgment to come,"
and thus making the Intellect also the servant of
Duty and quickening it in the direction of all true
science. This is no pagan ideal, fair, but lifeless
and powerless : but both a living power and an em-
powering life, a self-executing Law, by willing obe-
dience in those who gladly acknowledge its authori-
ty, and by restraints of shame and fear in those who
are resolved that it shall not rule over them. Here
are living principles capable, like those of science, of
indefinite application. Already they have reached
innumerable relations which heathen morality never
pretended to control, and are still far who knows
how far ? from the limits of their righful dominion.
u A stationary agent?" learned, but verbose,
and shallow Mr. Buckle and Buckliculus Draper !
Let us, then, look at a short catalogue which
might easily be made a very long one of the appli-
cations of these principles beyond where paganism
ever thought of going ; applications not made all at
once, and becoming stationary there, but successive-
ly and aggressively aggressions often resisted by
iire and sword and all other weapons known in the
THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
^^*7*' L/l_
^^^^ :%'
nether armory, but hitherto only with temporary
success true, in many cases the contest is not yet
ended but the past is sufficiently indicative of the
future.
One of the earliest aggressions of Christianity af-
fecting the civil and political relations of men was
upon the practice of enslaving captives taken in war.
At the same time it raised its voice against slavery
itself, the early churches spending large sums in re-
deeming slaves and in purchasing captives that they
might not be reduced to slavery. After long, deep,
and ever more and more controling. leaven-like in-
fluences in the conscience and moral being of men it
has put an end to both these universal practices of
the ante-christian world, with the exception of the
last remnant of slavery, under the ban of Christiani-
ty and of Christendom, driven to its lair, and now
contending desperately for its doomed life. That
this has been the effect of the moral power of Christ-
ianity we have as it were the evidence of our senses,
for we can see, in the records and confessions of the
past, the very process of fermentation of the divine
leaven by which it gradually invaded this realm of
selfishness. And what is the meaning of the indig-
nation of universal Christendom at American slave-
holding but a terrible protest of Christianity itself
against the injustice of slavery, and an imperative
demand that it be made to cease ? Or is this
a mere protest of English philanthropic " intellect''
against the error of southern slaveholders in so mis-
taking their own best interest as men of business ?
What a step this towards bridging the impassable
gulf of duality in the pagan State.
But a still greater miracle began at once, on the
48 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
advent of Christianity, to manifest itself in the lower
stratum itself of the State. That great human
scarcely human mass, otherwise hopelessly dead
and corrupt, heard the voice of the Son of God and
began to live. No longer mere animals, having only
an animal life, "live tools," as their owners and em-
ployers called them, they felt awakening within
them the consciousness that they also were men,
with the hopes, the rights . and the duties of men.
The slave could say, as he firmly refused obedience
even to imperial commands which required the vio-
lation of duty, ' ' I too am a Christian." To the
poor the Gospel was preached. The most stimulat-
ing and efficient of all knowledge, quickening the
very centre of life, now gravitated downwards.
In spite of all after attempts to prevent it, it still
found its way downwards. More than that, the
living germs became rooted and developed them-
selves there beyond all the means of watchtul and
jealous power to eradicate them. Strange thoughts
were stirred in that lowest region of mind did not
Christ die for us also ? are not we more than brutes ?
have not we some human worth ? Henceforth this
poor dumb humanity found voice, and in its upris-
ings against oppression it was not stimulated wholly
by blind rage, but Rights ! give us our rights ! for
we also are men. The moral man was first aroused,
for religious truth was addressed directly to the mo-
ral ; hopes, aspirations, daily stimulated the intellect ;
in some degree, and to some extent a better and
more intelligent life prevailed; concert was more
successful; alliances, organization became possible;
rights were demanded, granted, annulled ; privileges
purchased, exemptions bestowed, especially by dy-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 49'
ing oppressors, "for the good of their souls;" and
thus slowly, after long and weary contests with
the various orders of aristocracy, after many vicis-
situdes, arose, from the lower, the great middle class-
of Europe the methods varying more or less in dif-
ferent States, but the result always the effect of the*
same causes, the awakened consciousness of rights
from below, and the awakened conscience from above.
Here too the deep religious influences at work in
the minds and hearts of the oppressed are every-
where manifest. In all their struggles and discour-
agements their appeal was to Christ and the Saints.
Their confidence in them seems never to have
failed though they sometimes complained of their de-
lay. How like the religious trust of our own op-
pressed class ! In the Legends of the Saints which
were their nursery tales and everywhere their solace
and amusement, the Saints were always represented
as humble themselves and condescending to the poor,
the especial protectors and defenders of the rights of
the poor. The depth and sincerity of their religious
belief may be seen in the terrible effect upon them-
of a papal interdict. We may call this superstition
if we please, and truly enough in one aspect of it,.
but it indicates a power which mere physical force
backed by science does not often resist. Tn this
contest between the oppressors and the oppressed if
both parties were net equally pious they were equal-
ly superstitious, and while the one trusted confident-
ly in the Saints, the other knew well that God and
the Saints were against them. Hence if their love
of right prompted them to grant little, fear extorted
much, and their hope to bribe heaven at death was
often of greatest benefit to those whom they had on-^
5
50 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
ly wronged during life. On neither side was there
perhaps sometimes much true religion, nevertheless
the true principles of religion made both instrumen-
tal to their own realization, for they know, how to
exercise their power both in the will and against the
will. Thus the power of Christianity to mould the
State, though obstructed and retarded, was not de-
feated by the perverseness of the material. It both
guided and controled, as it still does, not only those
whom it had made enlightened and obedient, but al-
so both the blind and the rebellious.
But besides the strong incidental stimulus given
to the intellect by a knowledge of religious truth,
Christianity first taught and demanded that the in-
tellect of all men should be directly cultivated and
developed. This is one of the applications of its
principles, this is among the commands of the New
Testament. Here, as in the changes effected in the
civil and political relations of men, Christianity ex-
ercised its influence both from above and from be-
low. Men of the higher classes, as well as of the
lower, and great numbers of them, from the Apostles
to the present time, have spent their lives with great
self-denial in preaching the Gospel to slaves, and
other lowest and most degraded men. Where the
facts, the hopes, the duties of Christianity are con-
stantly made known, besides the result in the moral
character of those thus instructed, can the effect upon
their intellect be slight ? And although Christiani-
ty has been slow in convincing men that it requires
the full realization of all their powers, and that the
possession of a faculty implies both the right and
the duty of its exercise, vet it has always led them
in this direction. The same men who have most
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 51
contributed to spiritual enlightenment have also first
advocated, and assisted to give education of the in-
tellect in the lowest classes. Not only are all the
older and higher Institutions of learning in Christen-
dom of 'religious origin, but the very idea of educa-
tion as well as gospel for the poor, of universal
education, could never have originated but in Christ-
ianity.
A very small seed this at first and of slowest
growth, but at length this also has "become a great
tree" of which many millions have gathered and are
gathering the fruit. The vast sums of public and
private charity now annually expended in Christen-
dom and out of Christendom for the education of those
who would not otherwise be at all educated is one of
the grandest results of the application of Christian
principles, and one of the most efficient under the
control of higher religious teaching towards the re-
alization of the true State.
But the whole influence for the education of the
otherwise ignorant has not come from above. The
lowest, in proportion as they have been spiritually
enlightened, have sought education for themselves
and for their children. It was this influence from
below which produced the first translations of the
Bible into the living languages of Europe, and was
of great value to the self-elevating class in their
contests with their superiors, at the same time giv-
ing much trouble to men who had directed toe divine
leaven not to overflow, in its fermentation, the dish
in which they had placed it.
Another application of the principles of Christi-
anity, instituting entirely new relations between the
higher and lower classes of men, and interesting for
52 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
the many examples it has furnished of the power of
duty over selfishness that condition sine
qua non, and very life-blood of a true State is
found in the very extensive provision made for the
sick and insane poor, and for their children ; and
even for the vicious, abandoned and guilty poor.
This provision began to be made in the very earliest
periods of Christianity, has been constantly increas-
ing, and becoming constantly more efficient in re-
alizing the ends proposed by it. This, doubtless, as
all good things may be, has sometimes been abused
through the unfitness of its administrators. But,
even so, what is the animus towards the source of
this and other permanent good results of Christiani-
ty, manifested by, and how can fitly be character-
ized, the assertion, made almost in sight of Hospi-
tals centuries old, that " the effects of the most ac-
tive philanthropy rarely survive the generation which
witnessed their commencement ; and that, when they
take the more durable form of of founding great pub-
lic charities, such institutions invariably fall, first
into abuse, then into decay, and after a time are ei-
ther destroyed, or perverted from their original in-
tention." Let the author of this and many such-
like falsehoods be treated leniently. He could not
avoid uttering them, for he was building a showy
structure the corner-stone of which was labeled
'*' Morality is a stationary agent/'' He might with
more consistency have asserted that there is no mo-
rality, for morality necessarily implies personal, free,
responsible beings, which, by his philosophy, can have
no existence.
This kindly influence of Christianity has mani-
fested itself not only in " the form of founding great
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 5&
public charities," and other condensed and localized-
products of Christian duty for Christianity demands
charity as of moral obligation, and does not reckon t
it a mere gratuitous bestowment but this same in-
fluence has gradually become diffused universally..
All the relations of men have been more or less soft-
ened by it. That of man to woman what a differ-
ence between the present and that of barbarism, or
that of pagan civilization ! The relation of the pow-
erful to the weak, and of the rich to the poor
how much less of abjectness and cringing servility,,
how much more self-appreciation and manhood on
the one side ; and on the other how much less con-
temptuous insolence, and purse-proud disdain, how
much more respect for man as man, and acknow-
ledgement of rights not based on power ! What a-
change in pecuniary relations since the 'time when
the debtor could be sold into slavery or doomed to-
perpetual imprisonment ! How justice has softened
its rights towards ordinary criminals, and how ex-
ceedingly rare the execution of prisoners of State !
Persecutions of so called heretics have almost en-
tirely ceased ; not, as is falsely claimed, by reason,
of greater intellectual progress, but by a further and
truer moral development. Religious persecutions,
that is, by Christians, have originated in two motives,
and in both cases have been the effect of straight-for-
ward obvious logical conclusions. In the one case,
ecclesiastical power cannot tolerate heresy for the
same reason that the State cannot tolerate rebellion.
It would be demonstrably by the simplest possible
reasoning suicidal, and power rarely lacks intellect
in self-defence. If the moral had been as much cul-
tivated and as vigorous as the intellectual in cede-.
54 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
siastical Power it never would have been a persecut-
ing Power.
In the other case, religious persecutions have ori-
ginated in a sincere conviction of duty based upon
the plain logic that religious truth is better for men
than error, and that therefore the one is to be by all
means propagated, and the other by all means des-
troyed. The logic was good, the intellect did its
part, but there was a flaw in the moral perception.
The relation of these persecutors to Christianity was
too intellectual. A more spiritual relation to it
would have made them feel that as religion it re-
quires and desires and can accept only a willing and
glad reception of truth and rejection of error, and
that, therefore, as Christ had announced in the be-
ginning, compulsion could have no place in his reli-
gion.
In regard to war, what a difference between the
present, bad as it is, and the time when not only all
the treasures and private wealth of a captured city,
but also the persons of all its inhabitants were the
booty of the captors !
This milder type of relations public and private,
where there is more mutual respect, more kindness
and more justice, is bringing men constantly nearer
together, giving them more things in common, and
so making them more and more capable of forming,
bye and bye, a true Commonwealth.
But another most important and successful result
of the influence of Christianity is manifested in the
progressive elevation of the standard of private and
social morality. Let us acknowledge that in some
Christian countries private morality 'is of exceedingly
low type, and that in some localities in all Christian
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 55
countries it might more fitly be denominated heathen
than Christian morality. Yet, on the whole, if we
compare it with the morality of the best heathen ci-
vilizations, or with that of the middle ages of Eu-
rope, the difference is immense ; and if, instead of
taking the whole of Christendom, we look only at
those parts of it where Christianity is not the mere
performance of dead ceremonies, and is not addressed
exclusively to prudence and the intellect, but to the
moral and spiritual nature of man, and in consequence
exerts its true and peculiar influences, there we shall
find the difference between heathendom and Christ-
endom, in this respect, all but total. Where Christian
manners are at the worst they exhibit the first symp-
tom of approaching virtue, or at least of respect for
virtue, viz., hypocrisy. They have the grace of
shame, which is progress in the right direction.
Vices are denied, and indulged in secretly, which
were formerly open and shameless.
A very good test and measure of the development
of a practical and efficient moral sense in Christen-
dom may be found by examining, for different pe-
riods, the manners of the highest classes, especially
those of the courts of kings and princes. Power and
wealth tend always to affect the character of their
possessors in the same manner, that is, in the ab-
sence of moral restraints, to generate habits of in-
justice towards others, and of self-indulgence and
vice in themselves. Restraints may exist in the per-
sonal character of those to be restrained, in the cha-
racter of those around 'them, or in the character of
public opinion, the character of the standard mora-
lity of the period. In looking over the history of
Europe two facts are quite noticeable, first, that the
56 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
existence of an efficient public opinion is of pretty
recent date, and, whatever might have been, before,
the average morality of a people, courts and courtiers
were entirely above its influence ; second, that, be-
fore the existence of a more or less controling public
opinion, the manners of courts of all ranks though
on the whole making some advance since the tenth
century were, with scarcely a single exception, a
disgrace to the Christian name. Not that Christiani-
ty lacks power to restrain men in such circumstances
though we are all told that such shall hardly be
saved but they had the power and the disposition
to exclude all direct and true influences of Christian-
ity, and felt no restraint from any other source. But
there is now a public opinion, a universally diffused
Christian morality, or, at least, sense of the demands
of Christian morality, which cries shame, and that
too in a voice which has to be heard on prince, or
king, or kaisar whose manners are such as were not
very long since practiced without shame or rebuke.
Would Russia now tolerate the manners of Catherine
II ? Would any German State abide the beastly
princes that once ruled over them ? Would France,
or even Paris, now permit the existence of a '' Pare
aux Cerfs?" Not to go back to the early Norman
times, would the people of England now tolerate the
manners of Henry VIII, the court of Charles II, or
even those of the Georges ?
It is the exceedingly shallow opinion of some very
intellectual people that Christianity is the reasser-
tion of some pretty old rules ot heathen morality,
the same always and everywhere, and having the
same power always and everywhere, that is, a " sta-
tionary agent." It follows, then, inevitably, either
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 57
that there is no greater amount of obedience to the
law of duty now in Christendom than there was or is
in heathendom, or that all the difference is due to
the progress of intellect, and so cannot be referred to
Christianity at all whose direct aim is to restore and
control the moral and spiritual relations of men. But
is there now any more or more earnest obedience
than before Christianity to those laws which should
prescribe men's ethical character and relations, and
govern all relations where right and wrong are in-
volved ? Or to take the catalogue of rules which we
are told includes all possible morality. 1st " To do
good to others." Is there more good done to others
by Christian men than was the habit of heathen men ?
2d, " To sacrifice for others' benefit your own
wishes." Have Christian men made any more of
self-sacrifice, or have more Christian men made it,
and in a greater variety of ways than heathen men ?
3d, " To love your neighbour as yourself" Is there
any more of this love than formerly, or is the defini-
tion of neighbour more comprehensive than former-
ly? 4th, " To forgive your enemies." Are ene-
mies, whether public or private, treated any more
mildly than formerly ? 5th, " To restrain your
passions." Has there been any advance anywhere
in Christendom, or in Christendom on the whole, in
private and social morals and selt-control ? 6th,
" To honor your parents." Has there been any ad-
vance in obedience to this precept? 7th, "To re-
spect those who are set over you."
I suppose that no one will deny that these old
rules, which anciently were as dead as any other
heathen ideals, have, within the last thousand years,
been somehow getting themselves, on the whole,
58 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
more and more obeyed, that they have become living
and controling principles of conduct in the lives of
vast numbers of men , that they extend to very many
relations which they did not pretend to reach for-
merly, and that they pervade as guide and restraint
with varying energy the entire mass of Christendom.
Whence then this life which seems to have been in-
fused into them ? Is it a divine empowering from
Christianity according to its promises, ct the life from
God entered unto them ?" Or is it a stimulus from
the human intellect?
What is the relation of the scientific intellect to
the moral disposition and character of men ? Is it
a relation of cause and effect such that the intellect,
in proportion to its development and acquisitions,
produces or increases the willingness to obey the
laws of duty, of right, and of ethical propriety ? The
natural relations of the intellect are to all physical
and physiological facts and relations ; to the sciences
of the inorganic and of the organic ; to a knowledge
of the mutual relations of the organic and inorganic :
to pure science ; to political science ; to the science
of itself to the science of intellect. Thus in pro-
portion to its acquisitions it determines what is or
can be within its own* sphere, but it has no relation
to what ought to be. To determine this is the func-
tion of other faculties. Every moral relation im-
plies the obligation of duty, obedience to the law of
the relation. The moral faculty, the will, as the mo-
ral executive, is capable of two relations to this law,
that of co- willing and that of counter-willing, that
of obedience and that of disobedience. Now which
of the knowledges from all the realms of science ne-
cessarily determines the will towards obedience to
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 59
the law of duty ? It is true they may furnish to the
moral faculty new means of realizing the ends of
duty ; but they also furnish it with new means and
new temptations to refuse to seek, and to defeat the
ends of duty. That is, the moral faculty when
brought into relation to the intellect, and to any or
all of its acquisitions, will act exactly according to
its disposition and character ; to the good they will
be a means of good ; to the bad a means of evil. If
they have any tendency to change either character
it would seem to be for the worse, for it is found
throughout history that the higher and more intel-
ligent classes are morally worse than those below
them. But this is probably only a seeming effect.
It is not perhaps the direct effect of the knowledge
but of the wealth and power it is the means of ac-
quiring, for when not accompanied by these inci-
dents such effect is not always produced. We may
say then that the relation of the intellect to the char-
acter of the moral faculty is that of indifference. It
is neither better nor worse for the intellect ; it is
neither more nor less efficient for good or for evil in
proportion to its means. Or if there is any differ-
ence the arrogance pride and selfishness of the scien-
tific is increased. Modern intellect has not discov-
ered any new principles of morality, for these all of
them which are possible, we are told, have been
known from time immemorial, and it is not the
function of intellect to discover or apply principles
of morality. If then, there is in Christendom a
very much higher tone of morality, a very much
wider application of its principles, and more general
obedience to its laws than ever existed in heathen-
dom, whatever may be the cause, it is not because
60 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
intellect is the " only progressive agent." If, how-
ever, any one asserts that morality and religion are
only a wiser selfishness enlightened by intellect let
him rejoice in that opinion.
But if the intellect has no power to stimulate the
moral faculty, what, on the other hand, is the rela-
tion of the moral faculty to the intellect in this re-
spect ? Just in proportion to the sincerity and ener-
gy of the moral executive in obedience to duty will
be the desire to find means to realize the ends of
duty. When the moral faculty is itself truly quick-
ened it becomes the true quickening power of all the
other faculties of the man. The intellect is at once
called upon as the organ of ways and means, and
though powerless as a cause of morality, as an effect
and instrument of it most valuable and efficient.
That such is the true relation of the moral to the in-
tellectual, and such the effect of it, is not only a mat-
ter of constant observation in cases of individual
men, or associations of men, but often whole nations
are aroused to an intellectual energy and accom-
plishment which no other influence could have effect-
ed. For conscientious men the cultivation of the
intellect is among their prune duties. It is u talent
which to hide in a napkin is a most heinous offence
against Him from whom whom they received it.
It is certain, then, that the morality of Christen-
dom, in whatever it is superior to pagan morality,
owes the difference to the effect of the divine leaven
of Christianity. It is not under the patronage of its
servant intellect, nor has it its roots in that soil where
of all others there is the least " deepness of earth,"
the aesthetic beauty of virtue, but in the Christian
KELIGIOX. It is moreover, a reliable conclusion
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 61
which may be drawn from a comparison of the pre-
sent however still imperfect with the past, that
Christianity is capable of bringing all the laws, cus-
toms, and institutions of men into conformity with
its principles. Where such laws are, as indeed they
are already in some communities, if not wholly, at
least in great part, willingly obeyed, there will be
realized another of the conditions preparatory to the
existence of the true State. This is the condition
of all other conditions, the indispensable Christian
salt, without which, and hi greater quantity, I
fear, than is yet to be found in any whole country
the permanent existence of a self-governing State
is impossible.
It is plain, however, from this short and incom-
plete catalogue of results, from these undeniable ef-
fects of Christianity already realized, that the con-
stituent halves of the aboriginal, natural Duality
are, and have been, from the beginning of Christia-
nity, constantly approaching each other ; and, if
they are not yet fused together and become homo-
geneous, they are fairly in contact, or at least the
space between them is well bridged, the intercourse
between them is free and constant, and in some parts
there is mutual interpenetration, and combination all
but complete from the highest top to the lowest bot-
tom.
But has the power of Christianity reached in all
directions its limits ? Or are there limits, this side
of a degree of influence necessary to the existence of
the true State, beyond which it cannot extend ? The
divine leaven has manifested already mighty power,
is it not equal to leavening the whole lump ? Per-
haps we shall be the better prepared to answer these
G
62 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
questions correctly if we examine more directly the
methods of Christianity, and its actual workings as
illustrated and exhibited in its history, and why it
is that Christian civilization does not, and will not.
like pagan civilizations, revert again to barbarism,
but its progress, if not always in a straight line is
never apocatastatic but always further and further
from its starting point.
Christianity, from its very beginning, became not
only a new life in the morality of the world but a
new element in the politics of the world. By its
moral power, by awakening, we may say creating,
an efficient consciousness of DUTY, it preached, suc-
cessfully, " deliverance to the captives," and pro-
claimed from heaven " good will to men." On the
other hand, by awakening more and more in all men
the consciousness of RIGHTS for all men, with invi-
tation of appeal to God in their assertion and de-
fence, it indicated its latent power to "break in
pieces and subdue;" it proclaimed "a sword" for
all things and men incorrigibly incompatible with
civil and political JUSTICE, whatever laws, customs,
institutions, kingdoms, empires, or other powers to
the contrary notwithstanding. As Religion it re-
stores the true spiritual relations of men, which in
their inmost nature are willing relations, so that co-
ercion in regard to them is contradictory to their
very idea they are realized in the Church. But
relations of practical morality, of mutual justice, of
civil and religious freedom, of equality of privilege
and opportunity, all that pertains to the common
earthly well-being of associated men, Christianity
assigns to the State. ' These relations Christianity,
by its principles, proclaims to be the rights of the
THE CHRISTIAN STATE 63
citizens, and to maintain them is the duty of the
State, not only by enactment and exhortation but by
compulsion ot those who refuse obedience. Coercion,
when necessary, is implied in the very idea of the
State, because it is the State and not the Church.
But the duty and the right of coercion are on condi-
tion of a right end for which it is used. The Gov-
ernment may not say, " I am the State," unless it
exists for the ends of the State. Ultimately the
People is the State by the first law of nature, that
of self-preservation. Christianity requires obedience
to powers ordained of God, but not to those ordained
of the Devil. It announces the right in all possible
relations, and demands obedience to it, but it contains
no principle of suicide, of obedience to wrong which
would annihilate itself. As Religion is not only
without (outside of ) the State, but it is above the
State, and from the very first claimed for men the
right, and the paramount duty of obedience to a
" Higher Law" than that even of Caesar. Here was
the first practical collision between Christianity and
Power as force, in distinction or separation from
right. Long, obstinate, and terrible has been the
contest, but Christianity has all but everywhere
triumphed, not, as is pretended, because Power is
wiser, but because it is relatively weaker than for-
merly.
But aristocratic Power, though often very indig-
nant at the Christian higher law, has also its own
higher law, best expressed in the fundamental prin-
ciple of Asiatic despotism, that the king de facto
by whatever means his power was acquired, and for
whatever purposes it may be employed is also de
jure, and of divine right, to be obeyed. This doc-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
trine once universal in Christendom is now every-
where renounced, or if not, latent, or rarely ex-
pressed, and never practically asserted ; for there is
in Christian States a widely diffused leaven known by
experience to be sometimes dangerously explosive in
its fermentation. Thus unjust power acknowledges
itself, restrained by two imperative commands dir-
ectly from below, but indirectly from above Thou
shalt not forbid what Christian duty enjoins, or en-
join what it forbids : Thou shalt not withold from
men what Christian principles declare to be their
rights as men ; and because necessary to the perfor-
mance of their duties. It is true that to a great ex-
tent these commands are still unwillingly, and there-
fore, imperfectly obeyed. These principles are far
from being fully carried out, but it is felt on both
sides that they must henceforth control more and
more the relations of government and governed.
DUTIES ! RIGHTS ! rights in relation to duties
words without meaning in pagan politics, but, uttered
by the mouth of Christianity, words of power to re-
volutionize all Christian States. What a difference
since when the vast majority of all the inhabitants
of the State were contemptuously called '-live
tools ;" and when a free Christian people makes its
government aware that the State is for them and not
they for the State, except it be in order to the true
ends of the State.
This remarkable transformation of the State, mar-
velous if we consider it this mutual transposition
of the parts of the original duality such that the
former slaves have become, or are rapidly becoming
in effect the masters, while the ancient masters are
little more than the Agents of those who were once
TUE CHRISTIAN STATE. 65
their " tools" or perhaps in some cases a little longer
lords by courtesy ; a transformation by which what
was once an inert mass, an unassiniilated appendage
outside of the political organism has come to be the
seat of the central and true life of the State all
this is the natural and necessary result of the very
METHOD of Christianity.
There are many intimations in the New Testa-
ment that the Gospel is intended especially for the
poor. Christ gives it as one evidence of his Messiah-
ship, that the poor have the Gospel preached to
them. He blesses the poor. He pronounces a woe
upon the rich. He asserts that the rich shall hardly
enter the kingdom of heaven, and only because all
things are possible with God. God hath chosen the
poor of this world, says an Apostle. We know, ac-
cordingly, that Christianity had its first success al-
most exclusively among slaves and in the lower
classes of the State. Not many rich, not many
mighty were called. God has chosen the weak to
confound the mighty in more senses than one. What
then ! is God partial, and is not the Gospel ad-
dressed to all men alike ? God is no respecter of
persons, and the Gospel is intended equally for all
classes.
An obvious and easy explanation of the language
of the New Testament, and the difference in the re-
ception of the gospel between the rich and the pow-
erful on the one side, and the enslaved and the poor
on the other side, is found in the character, require-
ments and promises of the Gospel itself. Dives was
receiving good things in this life, and was much less
likely than Lazarus to be aroused by hope for the
future. Power then claimed to hold divided empire
66 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
with Jupiter, and in proportion to the degree and
rank of it would be less inclined to put faith in the
promise of a Divine Protector than the weak and op-
pressed. Christianity by all its principles and pre-
cepts demands righteousness, which includes though
this is a secret not generally known doing right.
It demands justice between man and man in all rela-
tions. u Also, He that ruleth must be just, ruling
in the fear of God." It is plain that these promises
and principles and precepts were gospel to those who
had no hope in this world, to those who suffered
wrong, who were the victims of endless oppressions
and godless despotism, in quite another sense than
to those lapped in present ease and luxury, who pro-
fited by doing wrong, grew rich by oppressions, and
great by the exercise of unjust power. What a to-
tally different and contrary aspect and practical re-
lation must the new religion have had to the oppo-
site sides of the dual State ! To the one side full of
hope, encouragement, an awakening to the conscious-
ness of manhood, life from the dead ; to the other
side if they had believed it full of reproof, and of
demands for self-denials, self-humiliations and self-
abnegations of all sorts where injustice had served
the ends of selfishness. Would not even those in-
clined to good, were it not to cost so much, go away
sorrowful ?
Thus Christianity, the divine seed, " takes
root downwards, and bears fruit upwards."
This is its METHOD ; this is the law of it. This is
the key to its whole history and results in relation
to the State. This is the reason why Christian States,
Christian civilization, are, and are to be, permanent-
ly progressive , while that of paganism was necessari-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 67
ly circular. From the first, the common people
heard the gospel gladly, and it pervaded with consi-
derable rapidity the lower stratum of the State ;
while, from the first, the aristocratic class rejected it
with contempt, or perhaps with instinctive percep-
tion of its consequences to themselves ; next they at-
tempted to destroy it, and failing in this, true to
their character, they sought to modify, pervert, and
make it subservient to their own purposes, then, and
always since, not without success. This is the stand-
ing type of the relation, varying within very nar-
row limits, between aristocracy and Christianity.
Yet the primitive inert mass transformed into a peo-
ple, as it becomes leavened more and more with the
consciousness of Duty and Right, the Salt and
Light of Christianity, is ever encroaching from be-
low in spite of aristocratic power or perversion, whe-
ther civil or ecclesiastical. These allied powers,
though they may sometimes be reached, and more or
less restrained by the leaven of duty from above al-
so, yet while they exist, and to the extent that they
exist as such, retain always essentially the same
character.
The Roman Empire furnishes no exhibition of the
full working, and outworking of these antagonist
forces in relation to each other. The lower class, to
a great extent calling themselves Christian, under
the incredible luxury and extravagance of their mas-
ters in the now decaying Roman World, were under
more grinding and irresistible oppressions than ever.
They were not yet sufficiently elevated by the influ-
ences of Christianity to enable them to throw off the
crushing weight that rested upon them, or to con-
stitute for themselves a better State if they could
68 THE CHRISTIAN STA.TB.
have done so. Although there had been much pas-
sive resistance, and a strong vital reaction against
some of the forms of unjust power, there was yet
very little if any restraining or conservative influ-
ence from below. On the other side, though nomi-
nal Christianity, such as court bishops would be
likely to preach it, had reached the imperial throne,
and of course the court and many of the governing
class, yet the whole upper stratum of the State was
so totally and irretrievably debased and corrupt, so
rotten to the core, that its preservation was impossi-
ble, or at least, God did not choose to make it pos-
sible. The Roman heathen civilization was essen-
tially heathen to the end, and followed the heathen
law. The Empire only perished a little sooner than
it otherwise would because there happened to be out-
side barbarians to give it the coup de grace.
At the end of the Roman Empire, and in the poli-
tical chaos which followed, Christianity may be said
to have had a new beginning, at least in regard to
its modifying influence upon the State, for the old
pagan duality was everywhere in the new States re-
tained. How much of the true leaven was left
among the remnant of the wretched victims of servile
oppression, civil wars, and barbarian slaughter who
were to mingle with the heathen hordes that recruit-
ed their numbers, it is impossible to tell. Unfortu-
nately for them the church duality, as well as that
of the State, was retained, or rather, the Church
aristocracy had become essentially one with that of
State. The original constitution of the church as a
visible community was such as the idea necessarily
determined it to be. It naturally assumed the form
of a self-organizing, self-governing democracy. No
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 69
power could be exercised in it, or by it, but spiri-
tual power. It had no authority but spiritual au-
thority ; and those best fitted, by their own spiritual
character, to exercise it as the organs of the Church
were to be designated by the spiritual body itself.
But by a gradual perversion easy to understand
of these offices in the church to other than spiritual
ends, they became desirable for other than spiritual
men. Hence, as power other than spiritual, and
wealth came to be appendages of these places in the
church, the persons occupying them often proved to
be more worldly than heavenly -minded. Not, how-
ever, as has been asserted, because Christian princi-
ple has not power to resist such seductions, but be-
cause where the carcase is there the birds of prey
are most likely to be found. That worldly men,
wise in their generation, might more certainly se-
cure these places for themselves they soon effected a
change in the mode of election of bishops by which
they were nominated from without, and for form's
sake there was to be an approval, or pretended ap-
proval, by the people ; and finally they came to be
appointed without any reference whatever to the
people they were to govern. Bishoprics were at
length among the richest spoils of power, given,
taken away, bought, and sold ; and the first appeal
to the people was when they were called upon to pay
the price they themselves had brought in market.
Even long before the miserable end of the Empire,
instead of the spiritual communities instituted by the
Apostles, each selecting its holiest men, " elders" in
the spiritual life, to be its own teachers, and to pro-
claim the gospel to the unconverted world, there was
built up an immense hierarchy rank above rank of
70 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
Christian " DIGNITARIES," vieing in wealth and dis-
play, in pride and luxury, and in unprincipled in-
trigue and ambition, with senatorial and equestrian
nobles.
Two most unfortunate consequences of this misde-
velopment fell directly upon the great producing
lower class already overburthened with the weight
of imperial extravagance. In order to support this
new establishment competing with that of the secu-
lar aristocracy, vast sums additional to those neces-
sary for the government and for the old aristocracy
had to be extorted from the Christian people. This
was the clerical way of enforcing obedience to the
Apostolic direction " bear ye one another's bur-
dens." But this was the least of the two re-
sulting evils. Would the bishops and other high
clergy, whose personal character was no better than
that of their pagan contemporaries of equal rank and
wealth, continue long to preach in its purity a reli-
gion every precept of which was a sentence of con-
demnation against themselves? No ! they would not,
and did not. But as a class though of course with
many individual exceptions where by chance truly
Christian men had come to be bishops as a class .
<c instead of endeavoring to cherish and promote se-
rious, vital Christianity, they did everything in
their power to suppress it, because it presented
such a strong and to them vexatious contrast to their
own mode of life. Serious and piously disposed lay-
men were persecuted by such clergymen as danger-
ous censors of their conduct. Often they were ex-
communicated from the church, or they separated of
their own accord from such spiritual guides, because
they could not believe it possible that men so pol- .
tr;
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. ^ TI
luted with every vice should serve as instrin
for the work of the Holy Spirit." (Neander.) It'
was much more to the taste and for the interest of
such men to let down Christianity into paganism,
than to bring up paganism to Christianity.
We find, then, on the breaking up of the Western
Koman Empire, each of its fragments assuming essen-
tially the same form as that of the whole. On the one
side of the Duality the secular governing aristocracy
of the State, and in alliance with it the ecclesiastical
aristocracy of the Church ; on the other side what
remained of the lower Christian population, with a
large infusion of fresh paganism.
One arrangement derived from that of the primi-
tive Apostolic communities, and of great ultimate
advantage to the lower class, was retained, or soon
everywhere restored the whole State was divided
into parishes, each having its own local priest, whose
duty it was to see that all the inhabitants should
attend mass on Sundays and feast days, not excluding
the serfs of the fields and forests. Such constant
meeting together of the same parish people could
not fail to make them more and more capable of
concerted action whenever it should be necessary.
And however rude and ignorant the priest might be
as he often was and though Christianity was
presented to them for the most part under sensuous
forms, yet some spiritual truth would find its way
to many hearts, and the intellect of all would be
more or less excited. If we add the effect of the
legends of the saints constantly repeated, the occa-
sional or frequent preaching of more earnest, more
pious, and intelligent monks, and the religious dis-
putes among their superiors often going on in their
72 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
hearing, and discussed more or less among them-
selves, with here and there the influence of a truly
pious Bishop, it is plain that, in the most corrupt
times of the hierarchy, even the lowest rural com-
munities were under educational influences both
moral and intellectual which must raise them very
high above the condition of corresponding pagan
populations. Already, instead of the " live tools"
of paganism there is coming to be though still ig-
norant and in great part enslaved a PEOPLE.
It is a singular proof of the divine power and per-
vading energy of the Christian leaven that even
from such a people there arose frequent protests not
only against the vices of the clergy but also against
their corruptions of doctrine and pollutions of the
pure morality of the Gospel. It was in self-de-
fence that the priesthood took away the source of
pure doctrine by forbidding the use of the Bible to the
laity. But besides the protests of the no doubt
often obscure Christian consciousness and duty from
below there was another cause of protest. For a long
time, such a people, most of them, would not ob-
ject to the metamorphosis, in itself, of an inward and
spiritual religion into outward, showy, and exciting
formalities ; to the exchange of the worship of God
in spirit andin truth for the worship of images and
relics, pilgrimages to shrines and holy wells. But,
unluckily for the people, even in regard to this
world, every one of the innumerable ceremonies and
observances of this unspiritual religion put money
into the pockets of the ecclesiastical aristocracy by
taking it from their own. Add to this the pecuniary
oppressions of the lay lords and of the government ;
and the compulsory labor exacted by both the secu-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 73
lar and ecclesiastical powers, and there were reasons
enough why protests of right against robbery and
extortion should be both frequent and more and more
imperative. Here, then, we have the two parts of
the ethnico-Christian Duality brought face to face,
their forces marshaled for the "irrepressible con-
flict;" on the one side by direct or incidental Chris^
tian influences, on the other by the principles of
pagan government ; on the one side the demands of
duty and right, on the other the denials of aristo-
cratic power both secular and ecclesiastical. The re-
sult of the battle so far, for we are yet only midway
of the fight, is the Christendom of to-day compared
with that of the ninth century. Let us take cour-
age, therefore, which we shall the more if we look
at the methods and some examples of the manoeuver-
ing of the contending forces.
The double aristocracy, though often contending
with kingly and priestly pride as to which half
should take rank and precedence of the other, and
as to which should have priority of extortion, has al-
ways been, in relation to the people, one power.
The pagan power first despised Christianity ; then
sought to destroy it ; then to use it. Precisely so
the post-pagan, but not anti-pagan, alliance of Church
and State first despised the rising, emergent Christian
people ; then attempted to destroy it as such, and
by keeping it in the position of the heathen lower class,
to make it wholly subservent to its own ends. In
all Christian reactions from below, of conscious duty
against vice or false doctrine, which are sufficient to
alarm the ecclesiastical aristocracy, and which it could
not negotiate with, it has called upon its ally the
State to put down the " heretics ;" and, in order to
7
74 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
prevent the like it not only took away the Bible, but
invented new arts and institutions of darkness and
demoralization. Where consciousness of right has
reacted against oppression and extortion, if wide-
spread enough to deserve notice, the State, besides
its diplomatic watchword " divide and conquer," has
freely and cruelly used its material power, and called
upon its willing ally to preach non-resistance, pass-
ive obedience, and the divine right of kings. I
speak of the method and measures of this double
power only as a whole. Many individuals in each
moiety of it have been reached by the true Christian
leaven and have counteracted to the extent of their
ability and sometimes at the expense of their lives,
what Christianity disapproves. But this power itself,
and neither moiety of it as is plain from recent
manifestations of its essential and unchangeable na-
ture, though it has sometimes prudently assumed a
very mild type of late years has ever yielded any-
thing to the people except through force or fear,
fear from below, or fear from above ; for superstition
has been of great benefit as well as injury to the
people, and death-bed repentances of kings and
smaller oppressors have yielded to them many rights
which they must otherwise have taken, and would
in due time have taken by the strong arm. The
creed of aristocracy is the shortest known " POW-
ER is RIGHT." Its choice of means is therefore
unlimited. According to circumstances it can use
force, fraud, flattery, bribery, assassination. Begin-
ing with the claim of being God's Anointed, it has
come down to ask to be legitimated by the people.
Just now, however, it is in high hopes of recovering
this important lost position, so as no longer to be
I
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 75
obliged to say to the people u by your leave ;" plot-
ting deeply where it dares not use force, and using
force where it hopes to overcome resistance ; its an-
cient arts of lying, slandering, dividing, bribery and
corruption everywhere revived ; its hired tools every-
where scattered ; it means to weaken by demoraliza-
tion what it could not otherwise conquer. These are
the methods and means by which the two headed
power has ever aimed to keep in menial relation to it-
self, in moral and intellectual degradation, and so
under abject control, the people it governs.
Long, painfully weary and slow, has been for the
people the process of ascent from the double slavery
of soul and body to its present elevation. And let
no sneering pretended believers , lay or clerical, in
the impossibility of the peoples' dispensing with their
guardianship, and of their becoming capable of self-
government, still flatter themselves that this is a
movement to be arrested. They will find it a vital
development, a slow, unequal, but sure uprising of
growth, and building up of an organism compact and
vigorous, the more energetic the more it has to act
on the defensive, as the thousand storms that try the
strength of the oak at the same time do but increase
it. The reaction of the moral, or rather, of the rel-
igious consciousness of men from below upwards
against vice and false doctrine, the persistent, ob-
stinate, and rebellious appeal to the Law of Dutj
as highest, are remarkable, we may say unnatural
factspeculiar to Christian times and Christian men. The
reaction of conscious Right against injustice, at least,
a perserving, more and more intelligent, efficient and
successful reaction, is also peculiar to the same times.
Tt is observable, moreover, that the religious reaction,
76 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
certainly at all the chief stages and great crises of the
contest, has constantly preceded the political ; but
also that this has constantly followed the other like
its shadow. This is not an accidental relation of
these two vital forces ; for religious duty demands
civil freedom, rights, as the condition of obedience
to its own laws ; and the mere reaction of suffering
against oppression, as the worm turns, without the
vitalizing infusion of duty, has never proved success-
ful. If sometimes, righteous indignation against
oppression, has taken the form of terrible and des-
tructive wrath against the oppressors, it was more
than passion which enabled it to succeed. Another
great fact. These religious and political reactions
from below, whether against immorality, or against
injustice, whether against religious or political
wrengs, as far as they have attained to successive
limitations of the wrong, have, with comparatively
Blight oscillations, held their ground. Each new
advance against the enemy has been from the vant-
age-ground of previous points gained. These living
ferments invade and repress successively, all customs,
manners, laws, institutions inheriting or adopting
pagan wrongs and corruptions. The new wine bursts,
one after another, all the old bottles in which it is
attempted to confine it. That this gradual invasion
and permanent occupation by the people of what
were once the undisputed domains of the double
aristocracy, restraining their vices, restraining in-
justice, limiting power, demanding better manners,
better religion, better politics, is a fact, and the
great fact of modern history ; and that this has been
the effect of the divine leaven, of the empowering
life of Christianity working from below upwards,
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 77'
the result of the gospel preached to the poor, an al-
lusion to only a few of the steps of the process will
make undeniable.
From the very earliest times began the protests of
duty against arbitrary power, and of the spiritual
life against the formalizing pretenders to it. Christ
himself described to the letter the contest into which
Christianity was about to enter, and foretold the re-
sult of it. " You shall stand before governors and
kings ; you shall be as lambs in the midst of wolves ;
yet, fear not, it is the Father's good pleasure to give
you the kingdom," a kingdom that " shall break in
pieces and subdue all other kingdoms." Whether
this promise will be fulfilled or how far fulfilled, in
the realization of the true self-governing State is not
material to the present purpose, it certainly includes
this as an incidental result.
The two forms of reaction of Christianity against
the forces and influences that would restrain or cor-
rupt it in its free development, against what would
forbid the realization of its primary spiritual pur-
pose, and against what opposes its incidental results)
may be distinguished but cannot always be easily
separated. Reaction towards religious ends, if it
does not always include, at least originates reaction
towards political well-being. Always and every-
where Christianity has manifested itself, and pro-
gressively more and more, by protest of duty against
prohibition to obey God rather than man ; of awak-
ened moral sense against vices of superiors ; of spiri-
tual life and knowledge against formality and false
doctrine ; of intellect against dogmatic tyranny ;
of conscious manhood against being reckoned and
treated as " live tools : " of civil and political rights
78 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
a gainst the unjust deprivations and extortions of
power. Whether these reactions have been, all of
them, according to the true spirit of Christianity is
not here the question ; but whether, if any of them
have not been so, they were, nevertheless, the natural
and necessary incidents of its presence. Christian-
ity, as a spiritual religion, excludes every form of
coercion as contradictory to its very idea, both in the
propagation of truth, and in resistance to error ; a
doctrine contrary to the conclusions of the under-
standing, and acknowledged only in the deepest reli-
gious consciousness ; a doctrine which arbitary power
and dogmatic prescription have always rejected in-
stinctively as not suited to their ends, and in regard
to which, at least as to restraining error, many good
men have been the dupes of their logic. Dreadful
have been the consequences of this error, whether
originating in malice or mistake. For the great body
of Christians has held to only spiritual or passive re-
sistance to prohibitions and prescriptions of arbit-
rary power in violation of conscience.
But the citizens of the Kingdom of God are also
citizens of the State, and, as such, they have no
duties, rights, or relations, different from those of
other citizens. Most unhappy have been the conse-
quence of confounding these two relations, of the no-
tion that, because, as Christians, men can only use
spiritual weapons, they must, therefore, suffer them-
selves to be deprived of their natural rights as men,
and of those common to other citizens of the same
State with themselves. It is not, however, necessa-
ry to enter into the casuistries which lie between
Church and State. It is sufficient for the argument
that true Christianity, as in the Church it tends to
THE CHRISTIAN STATE 79
give predominance to the spiritual over the formal,
so in the State it transfers the old reverence, obedi-
ence and loyalty of men from personal visible Maj-
esty found so often by bloody experience to cover,
not God's vicegerent, but demons to the truly di-
vine majesty of God's Justice; ever less and less
Rex, ever more and more Lex.
The first, one of the longest and deadliest ot the
collisions of Christianity with Power, and one which
perhaps more than any other has exhibited the irre-
pressible energy of the divine leaven, has come of
the reaction of duty and conscience against prohibi-
tion. " Did we not straightly command you that
ye should not teach in this $"ame ?" said the Jew-
ish Priesthood. We shall obey God, however, said
the Apostles. This religion shall have no place in
the Roman Empire, said Csesar and thousands and
tens of thousands of martyrs found that it was no
idle threat. But shortly the doomed religion found
place and kept place, even in the imperial palaces,
and in the throne itself. You shall not preach her-
esy, said the Pope to the Waldenses, and gave com-
mand to fire and sword to exterminate them ; but
to-day Waldensian missionaries preach safely under
the very shadow of St. Peter's. You shall not have
the Bible, said the ecclesiastical aristocracy to the la-
ity of all Christendom, and shortly everywhere blaz-
ed bonfires of Bibles and of those -who read them ;
but in how much of Christendom is the Bible now
not read freely ? You shall not, said Leo. I shall,
said Luther, and a million voices echoed, we shall ;
and a Protestant Germany, almost a Protestant Eu-
rope was the filling out of the response. Prohibitions to
the Flemings by two men whose names stink in the
SO THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
nostrils of history, backed by characteristic penalties,
mercifully softened, however, for women who should
recant, by burying them alive instead of burning ;
a few hundred thousand heretics destroyed and
free Netherlands and prohibitions extinct. "The
Reformed " shall not live in France, but die, said
the Pope, the Cardinals, the Guises, and Philip.
So said Louis XIV and the Jesuits. But neither
St. Bartholomew nor the Dragoons could accomplish
the threat, and the burning bush of '-'The Religion"
in France, far from bring consumed, is more flourish-
ing than ever. You shall not worship God accord-
ing to the dictates of your consciences, but of ours,
said king Charles, and pope Laud The Common-
wealth and New England were the answer. You
shall not have a Kirk but a Church, said Charles II
and the Bishops to the Scots ; but the Kirk lives and
was never in better health. You shall not tax your-
selves but be taxed at my pleasure, said king George
to the puritans of New England. The American Re-
public was their reply.
Several things are to be observed in regard to the
rebellious (so called) reactions of duty against pro-
hibitory power, of which the above are alluded to as
a few examples out of many. First they are reac-
tions from below upwards not, however, simply of
the governed against the government (a fact neces-
sarily implied) but of the people, of the popular con-
science ; for the purest religious truth like gold
among sand is the heaviest and tends downwards.
It is true that many individuals of the higher class-
es have joined in these movements and sometimes
have originated them, but always it is the people
which have given them momentum, and by whose en-
TUB CUUISTIAN STATE. 81
durance and fortitude, whether in passive or active
resistance, the opposing power has been limited. It
is among them that the leaven most efficiently as-
similates the lump. It is among them that the
blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the Church.
It is they who have rarely retreated from a point
once gained, or if repressed for a time by overwhelm-
ing force or betrayed by false or incompetent lead-
ers, it has been but as the retreating wave which
gathers strength for an advance beyond its former
limits.
Second, These reactions have been, successively,
more and more wide-spread, more general, either in
particular States, or in several, or many States, or
in the form of a common opinion or demand of Chris-
tian men which power has not thought it prudent to
refuse.
Third, The demands of conscience for freedom
have been, progressively, wider and wider in their
extent. Since the time when ecclesiastical and se-
cular corruptions and tyranny, in spite of much
mostly unavailing protest, reached their lowest point,
there has been a gradual, and to a great extent,
successful reclamations in regard to all the ritual,
doctrines, and organization of the Church, a revin-
dication, and to a considerable degree, in some coun-
tries, a practical restoration of primitive and pure
Christianity to all its rights and duties, and where
this has not been attained there is yet a hopeful
tendency in the same direction. Conscience has
successfully asserted its freedom ; and disarmed
Power professes repentance for innumerable mur-
ders because it has no longer the means to repeat
them. That its sorrow is for the loss of its prero-
82 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
gatives and not for the abuse of them is plain
enough from its movements wherever there is the least
hope of regaining them.
The reactions of the awakened Moral Sense were
and are peculiarly Christian, notwithstanding the
opinion of "progressive intellect" that Christianity
is only a re-enactment of pagan morality. The pa-
gan moral sense was dead " past feeling " as St.
Paul says. Immediately on the early misorganiza-
tion of the Church, but more especially after Chris-
tianity became the religion of the State, many men
not only wordly and unspiritual, but who were essen-
tially pagan in character, found their way for
the reasons already given into the places of honor
and emolument in the church. These men took of-
fice over Christian communities already established
and instituted by better men than themselves, com-
munities which had, moreover, read or heard read,
and reverenced the writings of the Apostles. It is
easy to understand, therefore, how the manners
of the rich, half-pagan higher clergy gradually
came to offend the moral sense of the Christian
people. Accordingly we find many of the early
heresies as the Bishops their historians very natur-
ally called them accompanied by most offensive (to
the Bishops) protests against the vices of the clergy.
Whether they contained any other errors of doctrine
is not often easy to determine, since our knowledge
of them is chiefly derived from their enemies. It is,
however, quite supposable that they contained some
incorrect opinions ; for, if the lives of the clergy
were the true fruit of '"orthodoxy," it was time
that Christianity should mean something else. In
fact, all the way down to the great protest and her-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 83
esy of the sixteenth century, the immorality and se-
cularity of the priesthood of the dominant church
drove from it immense numbers of men in the form
of so called and often truly so called heretical
sects, which, whatever their errors of doctrine, insist-
ed upon the strictest morality of the IS e\v Testament,
were frequently reactions of genuine spiritual life
against dead formalism, and always of a moral sense
against episcopal ethics. How far these may have
contributed to produce or to preserve a better mor-
ality among the people especially when aided by the
bloody persecutions of the ecclesiastical aristocracy
by which most of them were suppressed or driven
into concealment, it is impossible to determine.
Asceticism in its various forms, another reaction
against worldliness though not peculiar to Christia-
nity, though often not originating, even among chris-
tians, in a truly Christian spirit, and at the best in a
very imperfect idea of Christianity, a reaction from
one extreme to the other, was yet, on the whole, at
least for many centuries, a salt of very considerable
conservative power in the lower classes against the
demoralizing influences from above. For though an-
chorites and monks, disgusted with the vices around
them, and especially with those of their religious su-
periors, fled, in what would now be called cowardice,
from the world, and, as we perhaps unjustly accuse
them, with an exclusive and selfish concern for their
own salvation yet such was not the estimate of their
conduct by their contemporaries, and their influence
upon the world they had deserted was far from being
merely negative. On the contrary, their marvellous
self-denials and zeal for the honor of God, as they
were reckoned, in contrast with the conduct of the
84 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
clergy, filled the minds of the people with unbounded
admiration. Their prayers, their religious counsel,
their blessing were eagerly sought by thousands and
millions, counsel kindly and often wisely given. All
this could not be without moral influence upon the
character of their admirers. The history of monastic
institutions shows this influence to have been very
great. Their wealth, for the most part a spontaneous
tribute to their supposed virtues, is proof if not the
measure of this influence. It was by the earlier
monks especially that slavery was condemned, and in
later periods, after they became ecclesiastics, it was
from among the monks that came the most spiritual,
truly Christian and efficient preachers at home, and
missionaries to the pagans. It is true that these in-
stitutions, as they became rich, became also corrupt,
or corrupt men naturally found their way into them,
and that, when the fat offices of abbot-or prior came
to be filled from outside of the communities, and
were bought and sold like bishoprics, bad men were
found in the one for the same reasons that they were
in the other. But the institutions themselves were
not therefore discarded by public opinion. New re-
actions were successively springing up from lessons
which the teachers themselves had forgotten, and fresh
ascetics with severer rules were ever ready to enter
upon the holy warfare, sooner or later, however
though sometimes after worthy service to fall into
the same disastrous defeat, and from the same causes
as their predecessors. The monasteries not only
preserved learning, and produced many learned and
many truly pious men, but they were institutions of
education for persons not belonging to their commu-
nities, for children, and to orphan children instruction
THE CHRISTIAN STATE 85
was given gratuitously. All the way across the
dreary darkness of ecclesiastical corruptions and im-
moralities we find from among the monks, the lower
clergy and the lower laity, a succession of spiritual-
minded men reproving and protesting to those above
them, and preaching truer doctrines and better mor-
ality to the people, often with so much annoyance
and shame to the aristocratic clergy that they inflicted
upon them every degree of penalty from command to
be silent to cutting out the tongue and burning at
the stake. Notwithstanding that many of the monks
were the willing and most efficient tools of ecclesias-
tical despotism, spies, informers, traducers and oper-
ators of the inquisition; and although in order to
prevent both danger and annoyance, the attempt to
extinguish truth was persevering, and the effort to
demoralize all the sources of instruction were suffi-
ciently successful, yet the very excesses of cruelty
and vice, instead of awakening the fear of the one,
and sympathy with the other, only aroused in the
minds of the people indignation, and that most dan-
gerous of all the enemies of power, contempt. If we
look at the upper stratum of European civilization at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, at the un-
speakable manners of the Courts, especially at those
of the court of Rome, whose orgies outheathened the
most heathenish enormities ever exhibited by the
pagan city; at the ways and means for this impious
debauchery derived from the open and public sale,
in all the markets of Christendom, of crimes and
vices, with a regular tariff of prices, from that of mur-
der downward ; a little later, at a Most Christian
Majesty deriving the largest item of his revenue from
the sale of tickets of permission to eat good dinners
8
86 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
in lent ; at one half the property of Europe in pos-
session of lazy ecclesiastics in the open practice,
most of them, of every vice that enormous wealth
enabled them to indulge in, and fire and fagot for all
gainsayers if we look at all this, should we not say
that Christianity is utterly extinct, and that human
society must inevitably fall to pieces from very rot-
tenness.
But truth, though fallen in the streets, had not
been destroyed ; rejected by the rich and noble it had
as usual turned to the poor ; the good seed which
had all along been scattered by the wayside, though
sought after with very devilish inquisition, was not
wholly devoured up ; some, though mixed with tares ,
had fallen into good ground and was about to bring
forth fruit an hundred fold. The gospel, which the
people had long since procured for themselves in their
own languages, and of which they had been robbed,
was yet here and there concealed, and, as always,
manifested its power to open the eyes of the blind.
The hidden leaven was fermenting silent and deep,
and all the more energetically for the weight of pro-
hibitions which vainly sought to crush out, or to
circumscribe and confine it. Hence it was, that, when
a just anathema against shameless vice, and spiritual
wickedness in high places, was uttered by a simple
monk, unholy power defied with appeal to God, and
a true word of gospel proclaimed in the Name of
Christ and not of the saints, in every part of Europe
the popular response was as if by a preconcerted
signal ; and that innumerable hearts, as if already
prepared, rose up to meet and welcome the truth.
This was eminently an uprising of the people, for in
regard to those of the aristocracy who joined in it, in
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 87
how few cases was it not the seed among thorns,
choked and unfruitful. Glorious Coligny "qui me-
ritait d'etre du peuple," and William the Silent, a
few heroic German Princes, and here and there a
very small number besides of individuals of noble
birth, accepted, or were ready to receive the crown of
martyrdom, while, with the rest of the class, that
religion was the best which was most subservient to
their own ends, or at best their suffering for it ceased
a good way short of the stake. While they, for the
most part, were calculating how the new religion
would affect their worldly interests, among the people
it was spreading from heart to heart by mutual in-
struction and exhortation, and with a sincerity that
defied danger and death. Hundreds of thousands
of martyrdoms could not overcome their perseverance
or prevent their final triumph. The reproclauiation
of the primitive doctrines of Christianity, the reaction
of the spiritual against the formal, was accompanied
by, was, in fact, primarily, a reaction of the moral
not only against the incredible vices of the time in
high places, but against the shameless and impious
public traffic in vice and crime as the principal source
of the Church's revenue.
It was to be expected, therefore, that there would
be here a natural meeting of extremes, and that the
reformed clergy should sometimes extend their ethical
rules to things indifferent. But if the French pro-
testants were suspicious of fardingales and wide
sleeves, of lascivious curls, dancing, and gay apparel ;
if John Knox was sour to the taste of queen Mary ;
if the manners of the roundheads were not agreeable
to the chevaliers and were ridiculous to the sybarites
of Charles II. ; and if the American puritans also
88 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
enacted blue laws ; let shallow, progressive intellect
be amused therefore, and pretend that what it laughs
at was the religion of those whom it ridicules. It
remains, however, none the less true, that ? from the
time of these men. and by the influence of the doc-
trines and manners of these men and their successors,
more than by any other or all other causes, the stand-
ard of practical morality in Christendom has been
steadily and progressively elevated, until by the
spread of its principles upwards, or by the effect of
shame, and fear of public opinion, it has greatly ame-
liorated the manners of the highest and most dissolute
regions of aristocracy. That these influences are still
active and increasingly active ; and that they have
their roots in the same only fruitful soil of religious
principle is proved by the many agencies, often in-
volving great self denial, more numerous and varied
than at any former period, now in operation for com-
batting vice both in high and t low regions, and by
what until recently has never been undertaken, an
extensively organized, expensive, and otherwise self-
sacrificing attempt of Christian men to preserve the
morality of armies in the field, as witnessed in the
Crimean war, and more largely in our own present
war against the slaveholders' rebellion. The Refor-
mation of the sixteenth century, the seeds of which
had long before been scattered in every part of Eu-
rope, was both doctrinal and ethical, or rather ethical
by its doctrines, a morality having its roots in reli-
gion, without which it is but pagan morality, beautiful
and dead.
To Christianity is due not only the awakening of
the common intellect, and the almost universal diffu-
sion of education, as already explained, but it is to
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 9,
the same living energy of religious principle which
asserted and defended the reformed doctrines that is
due intellectual freedom, and the possibility of the
triumphs of modern science. Intellect itself would
never have asserted its own freedom against eccle-
siastical ignorance and tyranny. It not only would
have lacked numbers, but the requisite self-sacrificing
enthusiasm if numbers, had not been wanting. Not
that scientific men lack enthusiasm in their studies,
nor does science lack its martyrs by voluntary expo-
sure to danger. But, few merely intellectual men
would embrace the stake for an opinion. History
has fno record of martyrdoms of that sort. With-
out Luther how many Erasmuses would have been
necessary to defend intellectual freedom against the
Pope ? just as many as it would take Edward
Everetts to defend freedom of speech against the
slaveholders.
Having considered and described some of the re-
actions of Christianity, as it has manifested itself in
the lower moiety of the dual State, against the pro-
hibitions, corruptions, and vices of the double aristo-
cracy that oppressed it, reactions towards religious,
moral, and intellectual ends, towards the realization
of man as a spiritual being ; let us look at some of
the effects of Christianity incidental to this its main
design, incidental effects, not accidental. " The first
principles of the gospel of Christ," the most element- "
ary teachings of Christianity are calculated to awaken,
and do awaken even in the lowest, most oppressed
and dehumanized classes of men, a new consciousness
of manhood, of worth, and of right in relation to other
men. The fundamental position of the pagan State
that the producing and servile classes are but "live
90 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
tools," is met by the fundamental principle of Christ-
ianity, that, to deprive a man made in the image of
God, and for whom Christ died, of his rights and du-
ties as a man, by making him a mere imstrument for
the ends of another, is the most impious form of sac-
rilege. This truth, in the form of feeling much
sooner than it became a common opinion, silently
pervaded all Christian minds. Although the aristo-
cracy, practically taking the pagan position, have
yielded slow, unwilling, and for the most part, com-
pulsory obedience to the Christian principle, their
death-bed confessions, manumissions, charters of ex-
emption and privilege, " for the good of their souls,"
prove that they had only resisted hitherto the uni-
versal feeling. The doctrine of the rights of man
as man, in relation to his fellow men, of the essential
equality of men before God, first distinctly proclaimed
and made a power in the world by Christianity
though not always kept under its control has been
most prolific of political results. The reaction towards
civil freedom has always gone hand in hand with that
towards religious freedom. Side by side with reli-
gious heresies, that demand for freedom of soul,
sprang up polititical heresies, the demand for freedom
of body, and exemption from unlimited extortions.
In order to these not only a consciousness of right,
but concert, organization, and some degree of mental
activity and intelligence were necessary. These were
suggested, and to some extent furnished by Christia-
nity to the very lowest classes. The new States ori-
ginating out of the fragments of the Western empire
were wholly after the pagan type, and the great mass
of the population were called, even by the laws of
the period, " bestes en park,poissons en viviers, et
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 91
oiseaux en cage" But the division of the country
into parishes, where the same individuals were as-
sembled weekly or oftener, where they heard the an-
nouncement of great truths which could not fail to
move some minds, where they received some instruc-
tion however rude, and where they were taught to
have faith in God and the saints ; the original consti-
tution of Church Communities not wholly lost sight
of here were the natural germs and birth-place of
the CommuneSj Guilds and Free Cities of the Middle
Ages. These associations sqmetimes purchased their
Charters, and sometimes extorted them by force from
their overlords whether lay or ecclesiastical, and, how-
ever they had obtained them, they were always zeal-
ous in their defence and in adding to their privileges.
What some of these privileges were, and what the
aristocracy thought of them may be seen by an ex-
tract or two from the writings of the time. " Com-
mune ! it is a word new and detestable, for see what
it means the taxable people pay dues to their lord
only once a year ; (they were before taillables a vo-
lonte, taxable at pleasure) if they commit any offence
it is atoned for by a fixed (not arbitrary, as before)
fine ; and as for the serfs, on whom it was the cus-
tom to lay contributions of money, they are entirely
exempt from them."
" What a freedom is that of Cambray ! neither
the Bishop nor the Emperor can tax it ; no tribute
can be imposed upon it ; the militia cannot be called
out except for the defence of the city, and then only
on condition that they may return home the same
day."
The same leaven was at work in the fields as well
as in the towns and cities. Hence the frequent
92 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
jaqueries in France, and the uprising of the villeins
in England and Germany. They had got the hete-
rodox notion that they ought not to be bestes en park,
. and that if they labored they ought to have wages.
They made the very significant inquiry :
" When Adam delv'd and Eve span
Where was then the gentleman?"
But they were not yet sufficiently intelligent for or-
ganization on a large scale, and successful resistance
to their well trained and mail-clad masters, and the
saints were not found reliable. In France the reac-
tion towards civil freedom was extremely slow. Serf-
dom was not extinct even at the revolution ; and the
nominally free peasantry had suffered equally with
them up to that time by a most frivolous, proud and
unfeeling aristocracy, lay and ecclesiastical, and from
an always needy government, every form and de-
gree of exaction of laborious services, of extortion
of money, and of waste of property which heartless
tyranney could invent ; together, all that human life
could endure, and more, for thousands perished of
starvation. Even the Communes, the free towns
and cities, gradually lost their privileges, and under
Louis XIV were almost wholly deprived of them.
This part of the nation had, however, thereby, by no
means lost its real power. While the aristocracy,
under the operation of the general law, were becom-
ing, politically, intellectually and morally, degener-
ate, corrupt, and weak, the great middle class was ad-
vancing, and in all these respects becoming relative-
ly stronger. They, with the peasantry, constituted
the " Third Estate" or, as it might more properly
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 93
be said, they were the third, and the peasantry the
fourth Estate. The " Third Estate," constituting
more than ninety-five per cent, of the population,
and, though possessing but a small proportion of the
real property of the nation, paying almost the whole
of the taxes imposed by government, furnishing by
its labor all the income of the Church and the aris-
tocracy, and yet having almost no legal status or in-
fluence, might well ask, at length, and answer its
own questions ; "What is the third Estate*!
All. What has it been politically hitherto ? Noth-
ing. What ought it to be! Something/' And
forthwith it proved itself to be something by abolish-
ing both king and nobility. The " bcstes en park"
too, the most numerous part of the third Estate,
which the aristocracy had kept well enclosed but
took no pains to tame except by hunger and stripes,
wild, savage beasts, furious as if with the compressed
wrath of centuries of oppression, and with a terri-
able instinct of right, proved themselves to be " some-
thing," namely, the instrument of God's justice,
which demanded of a single generation the penalty
of all the vices and crimes (a horrid catalogue ! ) of
the double French aristocracy from Clovis to Louis
XVI.
But it is not among the French people that we
should look for the earliest and fullest effects of
Christianity in relation to the State. They make
excellent Christians when they are truly such. But
they are naturally an intelligent and esthetic peo-
ple, more spirituels than spiritual. These charac-
teristics, however, are not, alone, whatever their de-
gree of development, a reliable basis for a free
State. This opinion has already been insisted on,
94 TilE CHRISTIAN STATE.
and its correctness is confirmed by repeated exper-
iences of this very people. They have intelligence,
they have virtues, morality, though not yet of very
puritanic type, but as Guizot has assured them, they
lack religion. There must be a true religious loy-
alty to duty, which obeys, and insists on obedience
in others to the law of the common good, against
whatever temptation of personal or party advantage.
France as is plain, if we compare the present with
the not very distant past, is tending in this direction,
and may by and by excite the emulation instead of the
fears of Europe. She has gained immensely by the
revolution and in consequence of the revolution, in
regard to religious and civil freedom, general educa-
tion, pecuniary extortions, and the administration
of justice ; thus giving to the third estate positions
of advantage against the aristocracy of which they
are not likely to be deprived. Not only France but
the whole of Europe has been greatly benefitted by
the French revolution. It was a severe, but most
necessary and healthful purgation of aristocracy which
has since been, everywhere with few exceptions, less
shameless in vices and more prudent in its oppres-
sions.
In France the causes of the revolution and conse-
quent advance towards civil liberty and the true con-
stitution of the State had been slowly operating for
centuries. They had produced that great middle
class (bourgeoisie) which at length demanded to be
" something j" demanded rights long witheld, and
relations to the other classes befitting a Christian
not a pagan State. The immediate occasion, how-
ever, of the revolution was the natural and just indig-
nation and rightous anger of men frantic with innum-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 95
erable and intolerable tyrannies, degradations and in-
sults. In other States of Europe, where revolution-
ary movements towards freedom were made earlier,
and some of them farther and more successfully than
in France though their causes were essentially the
same, namely, such as has created a Christian peo-
ple, their occasions were rather religious than politi-
cal. Civil freedom was demanded as the only reli-
able condition of religious freedom. They were not
accomplished by a sudden and irresistible outburst
of passion as in Prance, but by long years of con-
flict, of martyrdom, and every lesser form of suffer-
ing and self-denial, sustained not only by patriotism,
but also and more effectually by the energy of christ-
ian principles.
How much the result of such movements depends
upon the absence or presence of the religious motive
is well seen in the revolt of the Low Countries
against Spain. All resolved to defend their charter-
ed rights, but how soon the Walloon Provinces, where
the question of religion was scarcely at all involved,
became reconciled to the tyrant ; while, on the con-
trary, where in the history of the world, has been
exhibited such heroic perseverance as in the Nether-
lands? a war of almost a hundred years duration com-
bined with organized murder and assassination, sus-
tained by a handful of people against the strongest
Power of Europe, and resulting in the attainment of
the ends for which it was undertaken, a permanent
political and religious autocracy.
It is instructive here, to compare, or rather to
contrast the character of the people with that of the
aristocracy the aristocracy as a class, for there
were splendid exceptions all the more glorious for be-
96 TIIE CHRISTIAN STATE.
ing so few. While the aristocracy, who had risen
with the people against the civil and religious tyranny
of the king, most of them, were ready to sacrifice
both patriotism and religion to safety and self-inter-
est, (had their price), it was the people, on whom
chiefly fell the hundred thousand and more martyr-
doms, the pecuniary and other burdens and suffer-
ings of the war, that persevered to the end. The
Dutch revolt was a politico- religious reaction of the
people against the despotism of both body and soul,
a movement in which, as the religious end was reck-
oned the highest, so the religious motive was the
strongest and most enduring.
The English rebellion was a movement of the same
kind as that in Holland and owing to similar causes.
These causes existed earlier in England than in Hol-
land and of course had been much longer in opera-
ation. The people consequently were, in larger pro-
portion, under their influence. There had been pro-
gress made in a hundred years. The people had be-
come more jealous and sensitive, so that less provo-
cation than in Holland excited resistance, and much
less than would have moved the English people in
queen Mary's reign. This is properly reckoned a
secular movement. Yet it is plain from some of its
immediate causes, the points in dispute, the char-
acter of the actors on the side of the people, the re-
sults aimed at, and all the other phases of it, that,
while it was political in form and method, the leaven
which pervaded it, the vital power and energy of it
were much more religious than political, and that its
tendency was, from the beginning, towards politico-re-
ligious ends a better State in order to a better
Church. This was also pre-eminently a popular
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 97
movement, for though some of the aristocracy joined
in it at first from religious motives, they were found
less reliable than even the Flemish nobles. Indeed
this trait of unreliability may be said to be charac-
teristic of the class even in matters of conscience.
So it was not only in Holland and England, but in
Scotland in the religious revolution of the sixteenth
century, in France in the religious disputes of that
and the following century, and in regard to the
ecclesiastical aristocracy in the English Revolution.
Here, as in the rebellion, it was the people, those
same puritans and their descendants the dissenters,
who insisted on the change of government.
These examples, to which many more might be
added, from more ancient and more recent times, are
sufficient to illustrate the methods by which the low-
er moiety of the originally dual State has gradually
encroached upon the aristocracy both secular and
ecclesiastical ; to show how the duality has been verg-
ing towards unity ; to show how the third estate which
began by being u Nothing," has demanded more
and more to be " Something," and is rapidly tend-
ing to become "All." The Christian aristocracy is
the same in kind as the pagan, and under the same
laws of development, laws controlled in regard to
some individuals, but in regard to the class, hardly at
all modified directly by the influence of Christiani-
ty. This development is in all respects productive
and conservative of the most complete duality in the
State. The secular power, whether government, or
nobility, aims incessantly at increase of power, in-
crease of rank, increase of splendor, gratifications of
pride, luxurious enjoyrrfent ; these are their ends
money, money, money is their means. Hence, mon-
98 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
opoly more and more of the sources of wealth, in-
crease of taxes, increase of services, increase of rents,
ever newly invented methods of extortion. The ten-
dency of ecclesiastical aristocracy is in the same di-
rection ; exchange of spiritual power for temporal
power and possessions ; perversion of spiritual religion
into a merchantable commodity divisible into portions
of varying qualities, to be offered, with a tariff of
prices, in market, or peddled to country customers ;
competition in all respects with the secular aristocra-
cy; the same ends, and the same means in part different-
ly acquired, a decidedly more cunning skill at extor-
tion money, money, money. The servile class,
" Canaille," " live tools," " bestes en pare," con-
sequently, more and more plundered and oppressed,
remain, as far as aristocratic influence goes, ignor-
ant, helpless, passive, hopeless, and of course vicious,
notwithstanding plenty of pious exhortations to be
" content with the condition in which God has placed
them." The development of the aristocracy is com-
pleted, or tends to completion, in increasing vice,
degeneracy of body and mind, cowardice, effeminacy,
anarchy, and return of the State to barbarism. Such
is the law of the development, such is the tendency
and direction of it everywhere, such has been the
result of it in all pagan States. That such has not
been the result in Christian States is due to the Gos-
pel preached to the poor s and the consequent trans-
formation of the dead and helpless mass of heathen
men into a Christian people, a people no longer pas-
sive, but antagonistic to both branches of the aris-
tocracy, reacting against them at all points, against
their oppressions, against their extortions, against
their monopolies, against their exemptions, against
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 99
their false doctrines, against their commands, against
their prohibitions, against their persecutions, against
their vices ; reactions towards freedom from slavery,
towards political freedom, towards religious freedom,
towards intellectual freedom ; reacting by suffering,
by resistance, by public opinion ; a people constantly
becoming relatively stronger than the aristocracy
physically, intellectually, morally, religiously. These
reactions are more or less periodical from point to
point, sometimes failing for the time, to reach the
point aimed at, sometimes receding for a moment
from the point attained, but on the whole always ad-
vancing, always more and more circumscribing, re-
pressing, limiting aristocratic power and character in
all directions. More and more rapidly is fulfilling
the ancient voice of one crying in the wilderness ;
" Every valley (chasm, social fen) shall be filled
(leveled up), and every mountain and hill (despotic
power) shall be brought low (humbled), and the crook-
ed (methods of business) shall be made straight, and
the rough ways (of oppression) shall be made smooth,
and all flesh (even down to slaves) shall see the sal-
vation of God."
Such is the popular development under the influ-
ence of Christianity, and in proportion to the true,
influence of Christianity as a detail of the effect of
different doctrines would show antagonistic to the
aristocratic development, and so for a time conserva-
tive of it, by diminishing its injustices and its vices,
and thus rendering it more tolerable and more re-
spectable. To what extent different in different
nations this conquest of the people over the aris-
tocracy, of Christian over pagan principles in the
organization of the State, has reached, the argument
THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
does not require to be stated. It is plain, however,
from our consideration of the causes and the method
of it, that it cannot be arrested until it reaches eve-
rywhere, as far as where it now reaches, farthest ;
until it reaches every remnant of unjust power,
prerogative, privilege, unequal laws and partial leg-
islation ; until, consequently, it reaches the abolish-
ment of the aristocratic class, as malum in se, as in
its very mildest form an unnecessary burden, and
unjust monopoly, since for practical purposes experi-
ence proves the aristocracy of character to be superior
to that of birth.
That aristocracy is not a light burden upon the
State which supports it appears from a single item of
expense as estimated by M. Legoyt, chief of the sta-
tistical bureau of Agriculture in France for 1864.-
The armies of Europe, in time of peace, "number
three millions nine hundred thousand men (3,-
900,000) at an annual cost of seyen hundred millions
of dollars ($700,000,000).
These same men at labor, he estimates, would pro-
duce an annual value of two thousand, three hundred
and forty millions ($2,340,000,000). Europe, then,
with a population of two hundred and sixty-two
millions (262,000,000) is the poorer for her armies by
the annual sum of three thousand and forty millions
of dollars ($3,040,000,000).
The army of the United States, in time of peace,
was sixteen thousand men. By a similar estimate
as for European armies the United States, with a
population of thirty millions (30,000,000), would
be the poorer for its army by the annual sum of a
little* less than twelve millions and a half ($12,-
500,000). If the population of the United States
THB CHRISTIAN STATS. 1C1
were equal to that of Europe, with army in same
proportion to population, that is, 16,000 men to-
30,000,000 of people, the annual cost would be,
in round numbers, one hundred and nine millions
($109,000,000).
The result of the comparison, then, is as follows :
Annual cost of armies in Europe for a population
of 262 millions, 3,040 millions of dollars, - $3,040,000,000
Cost of army for equal population in the United
States, $109,000,000
Difference, equal one item of annual cost of sup-
porting aristocracy, $2,931,000,000
I say the ' 'cost of supporting the aristocracy." And
this is true, for although the governments pretend
that armies are for keeping the balance of power, it
is~ plain that if they were all reduced in the same
proportion the balance could be equally well kept.
But armies in proportion to that of the United
States could not protect the aristocracy against the
people.
Three thousand millions is a handsome annual sum
to pay for the means and privilege of being compell-
ed to pay other and much larger sums, all for the
common purpose of preserving, " conserving" the
pagan dualism of both Church and State, to the
exclusion of a Commonwealth.
Aristocracy is very expensive. Its example also
is exceedingly pernicious, Its self indulgence and
rices, alike in both its political and ecclesiastical
branches, when unrestrained by public opinion, vices
which it would often be slanderous of animals to call
beastly, as well as its heartless and unjust extortions
and oppressions of those in its power, exhibit such aa
102 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
entire lack of self-control, such absence of the power
of self-government, that, if it is folly to commit the
government of others to those who cannot govern
themselves, whore better than in aristocratic govern-
ments can be illustrated the truth of the adage,
Stultum est imperare ceteris qui nescit sibi.
It ought not, however, to be forgotten, as has
already been insisted on, for at all times there is a
tendency to forget that progress towards the realiz-
ation of the truly self-governing, or Christian state
for the terms ought to be considered synonymous
can be successful and permanent only in proportion
to the right development of the people, a develop-
ment not intellectual merely bat also moral and
religious ; an awakening not only of the conscious-
ness of rights, but also of the consciousness of duties,
a preparation of character that shall make voluntary
obedience to just laws more certain than any com-
pulsory obedience to those which are unjust. It is
idle to extemporize a free government for a people
who are not yet capable of freedom ; although in
some cases the best and only way in which they can
fit themselves for it is by attempting it, even when
sure to fail. As, at the French Revolution, the indis-
pensable condition for the agricultural population,
" bestes en pare" of becoming fit for freedom, was
deliverance, at whatever cost of temporary anarchy,
from the intolerable and brutalizing oppressions which
prevented all development but that of the just and
terrible wrath which destroyed their oppressors.
And so in general, the condition of becoming capable
of true freedom is emancipation from slavery, and
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 103
where the masters will not permit it to be gradual,
it is better that it should be sudden than not to be at
all. But if such convulsions are sometimes the con-
dition, or the indication of progress in the right
direction, the conclusion already arrived at is not
thereby affected, that only an intelligent and Chris-
tian people, and that too a people much more than
nominally Christian, is capable of self-government,
and so fit, to govern the State. A people immoral
without ignorance ; or one ignorant without immoral-
ity ; and especially one both immoral and ignorant,
would each illustrate the folly of committing the
government of the State to men not competent to
govern themselves. The result of entrusting the
government of a community to a democratic majority
of ignorance and vice is beautifully exhibited in the
city of New York, and has often been, in other places,
before. If government by a vicious but intelligent
aristocracy is stultum, that by such a democracy is,
if possible, stultius.
The fault of the aristocratic government is not that
it governs the people, but that it misgoverns them;
that being, in theory, an institution in order to jus-
tice, it is in practice in order to injustice. The crime
of aristocracy is that it always gives the people a
worse government than they are capable of; is that
it tends and aims to make them incapable of self-
government. It always tends to the worse and not
to the better. All better has to be demanded imper-
atively, and often to be extorted by the people. All
true government is for the people, but the aristo-
cratic government, in proportion to its power to do
so, makes the people subservient to its own ends, or
rather to the ends of the individuals on the aristo-
104 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
cratic side of the duality. The relation of the
parties is essentially and always, so long as it exists,
antagonistic ; were it not so, were the government
aiming only at the true ends of government, there
would be a spontaneous and willing progress of it
towards greater freedom with less expense as fast as
the people became capable of it, with constant efforts
to make them more capable of it. That this is not
so the facts of all history and the proverbs of all lan-
guages sufficiently prove. That the animus of the
caste remains always the same so long as it retains a
breath of life is demonstrated by what is going on in
our own country. There never was, in its origin
and character, so contemptible an aristocracy as that
of our Southern States, nor one so monstrous and
shameless in its avowed purposes ; yet as soon as
the slaveholders proclaimed the true orthodox doctrine
of the whole fraternity ancient and modern, the gen-
uine pagan duality, slavery the corner stone of the
State, the aristocracy of Europe, though most of them,
for some time past, have " purged and lived cleanly,
as noblemen should," and though they have been
filled with pious horror at the toleration of slavery
by republicans, suddenly became by " tellow feeling
wond'rous kind " and sympathetic towards their new-
ly found brethren, especially as they are in rebellion
against the natural enemy of the caste a republican
government. That their late decency was due to the
coercion of public opinion, and was only skin-deep, is
plain from their extravagant joy at the prospect of
putting an end to popular encroachments by the de-
Itruction of the American government. What a
Godsend were it that they should be able to say :
See ! Republics, even under the most favorable cir-
THE CHRISTIAN STATE 105
cumstances, are a failure, and will never again be
tried. This failure is their dearest hope, and in
order to accomplish it they resort freely to the char-
acteristic means of hatred and cowardice slander ;
for never, since pandemonium was opened, has there
come forth from it so foul a group of liars as are the
leaders of English aristocratic opinion. It is a pity
to spoil such delightful expectations, but they ought
to reflect that, if we fail, fail, however, we shall
not through failure to have expelled all the poison
of aristocratic leaven at the beginning, the next re-
publics will probably thereby be wiser. In the mean
time whether we succeed or fail, through failure to
comply with some of the conditions of success, is it
likely that the movement which has been gathering
strength for a thousand years will therefore be ar-
rested, or even retarded ?
" He measured a thousand cubits, and he brought
me through the waters ; the waters were up to the
ancles. Again he measured a thousand, and brought
me through the waters ; the waters were to the
knees. Again he measured a thousand, and brought
me through ; the waters were to the loins. After-
ward he measured a thousand ; and it was a river
that I could not pass over : for the waters were
risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be
passed over." This is the Divine Stream whose
waters are risen, and are rising, cleansing waters,
washing away both falshood and injustice, life-giving
waters, for <c everything shall live whither the river
cometh ;" and what obstructions mightier than those
already removed by it can now impede its flow that
it should not reach all nations? " And by the river
upon the bank thereof, on this side., and on that side,
106 THE CHRISTIAN STATE.
shall grow all trees, and the fruit thereof shall be for
meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine."
The prophet has most accurately described the
process and the results of the realization of the two
Christian ideas of Church and State. Slowly and
gradually from point to point swell and rise the
Christian wafers until they become a mighty river
which cannot be passed over, breasted, resisted by
human power; and on this side, and on that side, of
the all-quickening and fertilizing stream, spring up
countless blessings ; on this side, spiritual, on that
side, temporal, a full supply for all the true wants,
and a remedy for all the diseases of humanity.
Thatj in many Christian nations, these results are
hitherto most imperfectly attained ; in a small num-
ber, still quite partially ; in the most advanced, very
incompletely, need not be denied. But this, in the
mind of one who has carefully studied the past, and
comprehends the method of Christian principles, will
not at all weaken his confidence that the progress and
conquests of Christianity, its power of modifying
political relations, are not to cease until there is re-
alized in all Christian nations a successfully self gov-
erning Commonwealth as the ultimate form of the
State, a State whose aim shall be not national
wealth without regard to its distribution, but national
independence, and provision, for all its citizens ,
of the conditions and opportunities of well-being,
physical, intellectual, spiritual, befitting a creature
made in the image of God.
CHAPTER V.
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
"That is properly said to be the chief end or happiness of a thing
which doth raise its nature to the utmost perfection of which it is
capable, according to its rank and kind."
"It is the business of art first to choose some determinate end
and purpose, and to select those parts of nature, (those means)
and those only, which conduce to that end, avoiding, with most
religious exactness, the intermixture of anything which would
contradict it. ' '
The founders of the American Republic proposed
to themselves a determinate end, namely, to realize a
true State, and to raise its nature to the utmost per-
fection of -which a State is capable. They also
adopted the indispensable form of a perfect State, a
self-governing commonwealth. As statesmen they
aimed at the very highest end. But did they select
those means, all the means which conduce to that
end ; or did they avoid with religious exactness the
intermixture of anything which would contradict it ?
They did neither.
Whether the true ends of a State are to be realized
or not realized depends upon two things; first its
CONSTITUTION, which, in this country, means the
organization, or distribution of the powers, of the
GOVERNMENT, and the fundamental laws which are
108 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
to control its legislation; second, the character ,
intellectual, moral, religious, of the people to be
governed.
It seems to have been the opinion of the founders
of the Republic that the constitution of the govern-
ment itself is the essential thing, and indeed more
than that, that the right organization of the govern-
ment is the all-sufficient thing ; that its several
powers may be such, and so skilfully balanced, that
no one or more of them can ever predominate over
the others so as to disturb the equilibrium. Perhaps
the influence of no one individual was so great in de-
termining the " balance of powers " in the constitu-
tion of the United States and in those of the sever-
al States for they are nearly all after the same
type in this respect as that of John Adams. How
highly he estimated the importance of the proper
distribution of powers ("an independent executive
pow er, three independent branches in the legislature,
and an independent judicial department") may be seen
in his u History of Republics ;" in which the opinion
is everywhere implied, and often expressed, that any
of the ancient Republics, and of those of the middle
ages, might have been successful and permanent on
the single condition of the proper arrangement of
independent powers in the government so as to " form
an equilibrium between the one, the few, and the
many." He even intimated that on this condition a
Republic might exist among highwaymen. He
thought that the character of the people depends
upon this constitution of government, that, in the
struggle to keep the equilibrium, knaves themselves
might in time be made honest men ! ! According
to this view of the subject a government may be so
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 109
constructed as to be a self-moving and self-adjusting
machine the product of whose operation shall be just
laws and good men ! ! !
That other statesmen of the period coincided in
opinion with Mr. Adams on this point may be infer-
red from the great care bestowed upon the machin-
ery of government in all the Constitutions of the
time both State and national ; and from the compar-
ative lack of care in the same Constitutions in re-
gard to the fundamental principles, organic laws,
which are to direct and control the legislation of the
governments. Their error. was not in attaching too
much, but too exclusive importance to the balance
of powers, u the equilibrium of the one, the few and
the many." Let us suppose that this part of the
Constitution which they labored so carefully is the
best possible, yet it is plain that it could not consti-
tute a permanently successful government without
regard to the character of the people to be governed,
and that of the men performing the functions of gov-
ernment. To suppose that several antagonist inter-
ests purely selfish can be so nicely balanced against
each other as to remain permanently in equilibrium
is as absurd in politics as a perpetual motion in
mechanics. If the faith of our fathers in equilibrium
did not quite reach to this point, yet it is evident
that their confidence in it made them less careful in
regard to the other department of the Constitutions
both as to admitting into them principles which
ought to have been excluded, and in failing to in-
clude those which ought to have been inserted.
What is, more definitely, the purpose of a written
Constitution? The purpose is plainly two-fold as al-
ready intimated. First, To determine what may be
10
110 THE AMERICAS REPUBLIC.
called the mechanism of the government ; and
second, to limit and direct the action of the govern-
ment. The constitution in its legislative depart-
ment should be both prohibitory and mandatory, and
such seems to have been its twofold aim in all our
American Constitutions. But the " determinate
ends " both of the prohibitory and mandatory claus-
es were indistinctly and partially conceived. There
is an attempt to realize some of the ends of the
State but apparently without the question ever hav-
ing been asked what are the true ends and all the
ends for which the State is instituted ? or rather the
question what is THE END of the State ? There
is in all our Constitutions an evident looking back at
the imperfections of other and older nations, and an
attempt to avoid as many of them as were seen to be
imperfections. That is, the METHOD is by exclu-
sion and avoidance of evil rather than one which aims
to realize a positive and complete idea
All good possible for man, is comprised under the
forms of spiritual, intellectual, social and physical
well-being. The first is by means of religion, of
which the Christian Church is the administrator.
The true relation of the Church to the State is that
of an independent ally, which, while it seeks exclu-
sively its own spiritual ends, does, incidentally, pro-
mote and that most efficiently the ends of the State.
It is, in fact, as already shown, the indispensable
condition for the State, of the realization of its
highest ends, yet so that the State must neither con-
trol nor subsidise it but only invite its influence.
This condition of success for the State is, however,
always within its reach since the Church is always
ready to enter upon the alliance. All the Ameri-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. Ill
can Constitutions recognize this true relation of
Church and State and are so far right. The pur-
pose of the State, then, in distinction or separation
from that of the Church a purpose which includes
all that the true State can propose to itself is to
provide for all its citizens the conditions of the three
other forms of human well-being.
It is plain that the cultivation, the realization of
his intellect is a high end for man, that it is the right
and the duty of all men, and desirable for all men,
and not for the few exclusively in order to the guid-
ance and control of the many, according to the doc-
trine of aristocratic States ; not the division of men
into two castes, the one to use only its brain, the
other only its muscles. . It does not, however, be-
long to the present subject to eulogize education as
the condition of intellectual well-being for the indi-
vidual. This form of well-being the true State
would aim to place within the reach of all its citi-
zens. But education, to some extent, and a cer-
tain amount, a pretty large amount, of intelligence,
in at least the great majority of the people, is plainly
the condition sine qua non of a successful democra-
cy in the American sense of the word. Even the
requisite moral character universally present in a
large ignorant class would not of itself protect the
State, since ignorance is none the less easily duped
for being honest. Both ignorance and vice, and es-
pecially a combination of the two are infallible hot-
beds of demagogueism ; for where these exist Sey-
mours and Woods make their appearance as inevit-
ably as buzzards find out carrion or toadstools the
dung-heap. Since such allies of Satan can never
be wholly extinguished in a Republic, the only poa-
112 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
sible way by which a free State can avoid a return to
some form of aristocratic duality is by such a diffu-
sion of intelligence, morality and Christianity, as
shall deprive demagogues of the only means by which
they could seriously endanger, or pervert the true
ends of the government.
Next after the true influence of Christianity, in-
telligence is, then, plainly, the fundamental condition
of the free State. It is the absence of this in the
great body of the people, permitting the combination
of intelligence and wealth in the hands of a few, in
which the dual State originates, a form which it
will always retain, or towards which it will always
gravitate, so long as this character of the people ex-
ists. The statesmen of our revolutionary period
seem to have had a general notion or feeling that
an intelligent people was necessary to the success of the
governments they were instituting, yet their opinion
on this point, if opinion it can be called, was vague
and indefinite. They were by no means wholly free
of an aristocratic leaven which led them to suppose
that the poorer and more ignorant must be under a
sort of controling patronage and influence of the
wealthy and enlightened. The comparatively gener-
al and high intelligence of the New England Colon-
ies originated mainly in religions considerations.
It was intended as a defence rather against ecclesias-
tical than political despotism. But the early consti-
tutions were the work of statesmen, who were think-
ing more of the mechanism of the government than
of the character of the people to be self-governed.
These Constitutions, accordingly, provide very im-
perfectly against the dangers of popular ignorance.
In the Constitution of the United States there is no
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 113
provision whatever, and no demand for the general
diffusion of intelligence. Congress is permitted to
i: promote the progress of science and useful arts "
by copy-rights , and patent-rights methods which
may produce some good machinery, and many very
poor books, but which are powerless against the dan-
gers of an ignorant populace. It may be said that
this was the more appropriate duty of the States.
That may be true in regard to the details of popular
education. But what if the constitution, which was
made for the people, and aims u to promote the gen-
eral wellfare, and secure the blessings of liberty,"
both for the present and for the future, had said, for
instance, that a condition of voting for electors of
President should be the ability to read and write
what a stimulus this would have been to all parties
in all the States to have all their friends educated at
least up to that point instead of promoting ignorance
and propagating darkness as the material by which,
and the medium in which, demagogues can most suc-
cessfully accomplish their purposes.
Or, if Congress had been required, instead of per-
mitted, " to establish uniform rules of naturalization"
with such conditions as would have excluded the
putrid masses of foreign ignorance and vice from the
polls what disgrace and dangers of the present time
should we have escaped, dangers which may yet, if
not guarded against, prove fatal to the Republic.
So in the State Constitutions the articles relating
to education are in many of them either a general
declaration that it is a good thing and ought to be
encouraged, or little more than a permission or ex-
hortation to the legislature to provide for it. They,
most of them, fail in not requiring definite and effi-
114 TUB AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
cient legislation for the instruction of all the children
of the State. They also fail greatly in not making
it obligatory upon every child, under heavy penalty
to be imposed upon the parent or guardian, to re-
ceive the instruction provided for him for a free
State has the same right and duty to forbid ignorance
that it has to forbid crime, and must forbid it or
exclude it from political relations under the most
imperative law of self preservation ; and it is plain
that this self-defence is still more necessary for the
United States than for any particular State. Each
State is under the protection of the United States,
which is bound to guarantee to it a republican form
of government ; but if the lowest products of Euro-
pean despotisms, and the contents of their general
jail deliveries are to be courted by our political par-
ties, and hold the balance of power between them
the cesspool of demagogueism, corrupt and corrupting
all that comes in contact with it who shall guaran-
tee to the United States itself a Republican form of
government, or what shall preserve it from disinte-
gration when the bond of intelligent patriotism which
makes it E pluribus unum no longer exists ? The
Constitution and Laws of the United States are
altogether inefficient against this insidious, and so
long as our naturalization laws remain as at present
ever increasing danger ; and the State laws, even in
most of the free States, are very imperfect. The
execution of the laws is still more imperfect than the
legislation. In the free States, however, public
opinion on this subject is becoming more awake and
more correct, and the laws are supplemented largely
and liberally by the action of Christian and patriotic
individuals. Let us hope that even with politicians,
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 115
and in legislatures, the time is coming when the fun-
damental interests, the honor and safety of the
Republic, will take precedence of party successes.
In the slave States, where, whatever may be their
written constitutions and the pretentious Declarations
of Rights annexed to them, the governments are
aristocracies, dualisms after the pagan type, it is
the great masses of ignorant, and therefore easily
duped and excited, " white trash," which are the
condition, the means, the very pabulum of the re-
bellion, the "live tools" fit and efficient for the
ambitious schemes of the slaveholders. Such " tools"
northern demagogues, politicians by trade, and or-
ganized liars by profession, are preparing, to the extent
of their power, aided by European aristocrats, and
the unwatchfulness of hpnost men, for the accom-
plishment of their schemes. This most pestiferous
spawn of pandemonium can never be got rid of except
by removing the dunghill in which it is hatched. So
long as the balance of power at the polls is held by
mere voting tools controlled not only by liars and
money, but by important offices promised to their
favorites by contending parties, and, in consequence,
the wickedest and meanest of men are both makers
and interpreters of the laws, can anything be more
absurd than to expect the true ends of a free govern-
ment to be realized ? The unassimilated masses must
be made to partake of the proper life of the State or
else be excluded from the political body. But ex-
clusion except as a probation and stimulus to self-
qualification is contradictory to the idea of the
self-governing State, and might in the end prove
more dangerous than the evil it was intended to
remedy, as the South may find hereafter if it shall
116 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
attempt to exclude the now emancipated negroes from
political rights. Fortunately the interests of all
except the demagogues themselves are one with
the true ends of the State : and the proportion of
American-born citizens and of intelligent foreigners
who are no longer led blindly by party names and
countersigns, and the dictation of party leaders in
order to personal advantage to themselves of which
the fewest of their followers can partake, is evidently
on the increase. The number of those who can be
successfully duped by organized systems of lying,
were it not for constant new importations of ignor-
ance, is becoming annually less. The Church, the
clergy with the exception of a few aristocratic
conservatives in the free States, are diffusing a
truer light, and more of a salt which has not lost its
savor. Let all Christian and patriotic men, both
governors and governed, aim to increase the number
of those who truly partake of the intelligent and mor-
al life of the self-governing State, that our Republic
may manifest itself as an organized and organific
unity in contrast with all lifeless dual structures,
filling with fear if not with shame the malevolent and
lying aristocrats who are watching and working
eagerly for our failure.
These are, doubtless, very trite and obvious con-
siderations and exhortations, but that there is still
abundant occasion for them, that our Constitutions
and Laws are very imperfect and inefficient in regard
to this fundamental condition of a successful self-gov-
erning State, AN INTELLIGENT PEOPLE, is apparent
from the fact that after almost a hundred years of
self-government, in nearly every State, and of course
in all national elections, the balance of power at the
THE AMERICAN RERUBLIC. 117
polls is held by men, who, though they have no
interest in being deceived, are through sheer igno-
rance, the mere tools of demagogues. Add to this
mass of honest dupes the openly bribed brutish
horde which in the cities and large towns the dema-
gogues have managed to make citizens, and we can
understand how it is, that there are found in all our
legislatures, from the Senate of the United States
down, so many men whose natural places, both in
point of intelligence and moral character, are village
bar-rooms and city hells, from which, in fact, they
have been transplanted. Alas ! how far are we
still from realizing the idea of our representative
Republics, according to which the ballot is to evolve
the highest practical intelligence and morality, the
most developed reason of the communities in which
it is used ! In how few communities is this end
aimed at, or even thought of, or indeed any other end
by large numbers of voters except the success of
''our party." Notwithstanding incessant talk and
endless declamation, and some legislation, on the
subject, there never has been anywhere an efficient
plan, a determined purpose to require, to insist on,
and therefore to make intelligent voters. Let us
hope that, if we do not, in the present contest, perish
through lack of having protected this vital point,
we shall be found capable at least of learning by
experience.
But let us not trust wholly to intelligence. The
other vital point, the requisite moral and religious
character, also still needs most strenuous defence ;
and this the more, because, besides the natural gravi-
tation of men towards the worse, there are, even in
this country, men of learning and influence willing
118 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
to entrust everything to mere godless intellect : men
who believe only in science ; who " find no provision
in the nervous system for the improvement of the
moral! save indirectly through the intellectual."
The scientific anatomist does not find Christianity
anywhere in the nervous system, even the skilfulest
chemistry cannot detect it there how unfortunate !
hence the inevitable conclusion that intellect is the
only " progressive agent." That many in Europe,
in the pride of intellect, arrogant from their success
as men of science, and forming their opinions of
Christianity by what they have observed of the ef-
fect of State Religions, especially upon the adminis-
trators of them, should doubt its power to aid the
progress of society in the right direction is a fact not
difficult to account for. That Christianity is dishon-
ored in this country also, at least in many parts of
it, by men bearing its narnej is past disputing. It is,
however, none the less true, and undeniably so, that
practical morality has, always, and everywhere, been
in proportion to the presence of true Christianity :
in proportion to progressive intellect never, any-
where, in the absence of Christianity. It is none
the less true that the ends of the State have been
realized in proportion as its citizens have believed in
and obeyed the laws of Christianity. It may be un-
lucky that no " provision for the improvement of
the moral " was put into the nervous system, but,
in the absence of that forgotten or lost organ, Chris-
tianity is plainly the only efficient substitute for it.
Universal intelligence is not needed in the free State
in order " indirectly " to promote morality, but to
enable the people to defend themselves against the
sophistries and organized lying of immoral, well-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 119
progressed and in the same degree wicked intellect.
In regard to social well-being as determined by
civil and political rights and relations, on condition of
their proper use, there is perhaps some reason for
the stereotype boast of declaimers that we have the
" best government under heaven." This boast is
true practically, however, only of the governments
of some of the free States, or if of all of them it is
so only because all other governments are exceeding-
ly bad. The governments of the slave States, on
the other hand, have been the worst under heaven ,
producing, as their natural and necessary result,
three classes of men of great political inequality, but
morally about equally worthless, a small purse-proud,
vulgar, semibarbarous aristocracy ; large masses of
ignorant and vicious "poor whites ;" and slaves, the
possession of one of the two other classes, and the curse
of both.
The Constitution of the United States, by recog-
nizing and defending the legal character and claims
of slavery, made itself parliceps crimmis with the
South, a crime for which, with the Declaration of In-
dependence still in the mouths of its authors there
never can be made an apology. The only extenua-
tion is in their belief that slavery was soon to die a
natural death. How great a crime it was against
the victims of it, and against the State, to deprive
millions of men of their humanity blotting out
the brain of the slave as well as robbing his muscles
- both in those who insisted on committing it, and
in those who consented with them, we are likely to
learn by the legitimate and just consequences of it,
in part already inflicted by a retributive Providence
upon both parties, and " His Hand is stretched out
120 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
still." Never has the displeasure of God at viola-
tion of the laws of rightousness been more plainly
manifested, or His justice more signally vindicated,
since the most terrible maledictions of the old
prophets were executed upon rebellious Jews. So
fearful a thing is a false principl e, a leaven of injus-
tice in the organic laws of the State, the substitution
of human self-will for the eternal law of right, one
with the will of God.
Will politicians learn by such experience ? Alas !
no, they never rise above the belief that God is on the
side of the heaviest cannon and the most skilful
managers of elections. Southern politicians used
their finest craft to make Mr. Lincoln President
they had their purpose. God intended they should
succeed He had his purpose. Do they begin to
find His purpose different from their own ? not at
all, only at present they lack the heaviest cannon.
So Northern politicians are preparing their deepest
strategy to conserve and restore slavery to the ex-
tent, rank and influence it had before the rebellion.
What hope then remains but in the wider diffusion
and infusion of the light and salt of Christianity in
order to a true " Uprising" of the people to an intel-
lectual and moral level above the sphere of the pest-
ilent influences Jrorn beloiv which so many of them
have hitherto obeyed. Surely unless God intends
not our reformation but our destruction, the occasion
will evolve wise statesmen to take the place of the
bastard tribe of politicians who have so long ruled
over us, Christian and patriotic men will awake to
their duties, and no future coalition between Northern
demagogues and Southern Slaveholders if such
can ever again be formed, which God forbid ! will
TIIE AMERICAN It K PUBLIC. 121
find either voting tools or preaching tools wherewith
to accomplish its accursed purposes. Let us thank
God, and one true statesman at least for the progress
already made in the right direction, and hope and
work that one false and fatal principle may be wholly
and forever eliminated from our politics and so a re-
petition of the consequences of its presence be
avoided.
Civil freedom, the absence of legal slavery, and
political equality, are good under all circumstances
in oo far as they give the consciousness of manhood,
and self-respect, which are among the conditions of
becoming truly a man, but they may exist under
circumstances which render them of very little other
value to some of their possessors. The organic laws,
or the legislation of the State, may be such, positive-
ly or negatively, thr t, while in appearance and form
and intent^ they are just and equal for all, and aim
at a true unity and commonwealth, they may be very
unjust to some, very unequal, and tend inevitably,
though it may be slowly and insidiously, to a dan-
gerous or fatal duality. In the Declarations of
Rights prefixed to raost of our State Constitutions,
and in the Declaration of Independence it is asserted
that all men are " created," or " born" equal, that
is, naturally entitled to equal social rights and im-
munities ; but it is also implied in most subsequent
legislation, that men are equal in moral and intellec-
tual character and endowments. Since, however,
this is not so, equal laws for unequal subjects tend
to great inequalities. How all this may be so, and
how far our republican governments are faulty in
these respects may appear by considering the physi-
cal well-being of its citizens as one of the ends of the
11
122 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
State, and the natural consequences of its failure to
realize it.
Provision to a certain extent for the primary
wants of the physical life, food, raiment, shelter, are
of course indispensable to living at all. But being
and well-being may be very wide asunder. Physi-
cal well-being implies and demands such physical
provision, conditions and relations as permit the full
healthful performance of the functions of all the or-
gans of the body. They must not be such as require
excessive and exclusive muscular labor in order to.
live, and thereby become incompatible with the true
human ends of life. Some men will be mere ani-
mals in the midst, and in spite of all opportunities
to be more ; but the true State will, however, put in
the power of all its citizens, and defend them in the
right to become men by the full self-realization of
both body and mind. Throughout all nature the
lower is the condition of the higher. So physical
well-being, which is common to men and animals, is
the condition of the development and proper posses-
sion of that by which men are more than animals.
Here we come to, perhaps, the most difficult prob-
lem with which the statesman has to deal the
legitimate production and just distribution of material
wealth -just distribution, and legitimate production.
Just distribution is not necessarily equal distribu-
tion ; but he who studies the genesis of wealth, that
is, of large accumulations of property in the posses-
sion of individuals, will find injustice not an occasional
and accidental, but a constant and necessary element
of such wealth. Somewhere in the process injustice
has entered as an ingredient without which the ac-
cumulation could not have been made injustice,
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 123
however, in the Christian, not always in the legal
sense. There maj be imagined, and there may exist
exceptional cases, but I speak of ordinary " business
transactions."
I am aware of the feeling with which this assertion
would be received in any business community, but
this, perhaps, instead of disproving its truth, only
shows how far business relations are from being con-
trolled by the principles of Christianity. Are the
ordinary and almost constantly observed effects of
great wealth upon the character of the possessors,
both in pagan and Christian times, especially upon
the heirs of those who acquired it, and the fact that
the rich man shall so hardly be saved, retributive
consequences of the injustice which is a necessary
ingredient of it ?
A competency, that is, enough to furnish the con-
ditions of a true human life, with accumulation
sufficient for the education of children and for other
proper private arid public demands, is within the
reach of all not deprived of or neglecting natural op-
portunities, and that without excessive or exclusive
muscular labor. It is to such men of moderate
means that appeals can always be most successfully
made to assist in promoting the great ends of educa-
tion and religion and other worthy public objects,
their contributions being more ready and larger in
proportion to pecuniary ability than those of rich
men, with fewest exceptions. The more equally
wealth is distributed or at least in the absence of
extreme differences the more readily available it is
for all the high and true ends of it whether private
or public. The number of families possessing a quiet
competence with personal industry has been and is
124 TUB AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
increasing under the influence of Christianity ; but
to how many are the natural opportunities necessary
to its acquisition still entirely beyond their reach;
for how many do the products of their labor belong
much more to others than to themselves !
Legitimate production is that of products which,
whether in material or form, subserve the true ends
of material wealth. Those products of labor which
enrich some only in proportion as they injure others,
even if it is by their own consent, products producing
poverty vice and crime, are surely illegitimate in the
true State, and will be discouraged and forbidden by a
truly self-governing people. That our governments
are imperfect on this point both in their Constitutions
and laws, and that there is here room and necessity
for a higher statesmanship, and a wider and a deeper
infusion and application of Christian principles, is not
to be denied. Here, however, at least in regard to
some of these products, there is progress both in pub-
lic opinion and in consequent legislation.
In regard to the distribution of wealth, the natur-
al tendency under the effects of what are called
equal laws, is towards great inequality ; not simply
a healthful difference, but such that, while some
have more than the true ends of wealth require, in
others deficiency may defeat all but the very lowest
of those ends ; for the tendency is not only to ine-
quality but more and more to the very extremes of
inequality. This is easily understood from the na-
tural differences of men : to provide against the con-
sequences of which is one of the primary duties of
the State. If a certain quantity of food, enough to
give one sufficient meal to a large number of hungry
men, were offered to them under the " equal law "
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 125
that each should have so much as his strength en-
abled him to seize, it is certain that some would
have much more than they could eat at one meal,
and that others must still remain hungry. If it
were announced at the same time that this food must
serve for a number, an uncertain number, of meals,
the inequality of the distribution would be much
greater still. This is exactly the natural condition
of men in relation to food, in respect of muscular
strength, and the uncertainty of provision for the
future. But Society forbids, and, except in its pri-
mary or retrograde stages, prevents the robbery of the
weaker by the stronger muscles. The claim of
right to appropriate the product of another man's la-
bor, (if of the same Society) founded on mere mus-
cular superiority, is nowhere allowed even by the
lowest civilization above slavery. If, however, the
weaker party be of another tribe or nation, or be an-
other tribe or nation, how high must be the civiliza-
tion, how deep the infusion of the Christian element
before this claim of the rights of superior strength
will cease to be practically asserted ? Alas ! higher
and deeper than any hitherto attained.
If. in the case of food just supposed, the distribu-
tion were to take place under the equal law that each
man should have what he could acquire by strength
of brain instead of muscles, in competition with the
brains of all the others, so that the quantity of food
acquired by each should be in proportion to the en-
dowment, development and activity of his intellect,
and his defect of moral sense, it is plain that the ine-
quality of the distribution would be still greater than
before, since the intellectual and moral differences
of men are much greater than the muscular. Now this
126 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
is, nearly, in our communities, the relation of men
to material wealth. Its acquisition is essentially a
contest of intellect. But while the State protects
the weaker muscles against the stronger, it protects
very inefficiently, or not at all, both brains and mus-
cles against the stronger brain. Material wealth,
though the immediate product of muscular labor,
does not, however, belong, in society, to those whose
muscles produced it, but is to be distributed in pro-
portion to the intellect of those who contend for it.
Whatever part of it can be acquired by bargain,
either before or after its production, whether justly,
or unjustly by taking advantage of the ignorance
the lack of judgment, the lack of self-control, or of
the necessities of the producers, that, practically, the
law allows and the court awards. And, as in the old
piratical times, the plunderer is honored and the
plundered despised. The inevitable consequence is,
under these equal laws, that wealth tends constant-
ly to accumulate, with an ever self-increasing power,
in the hands of some, beyond the legitimate purpose
for which it is needed. On the other hand, inas-
much as many are wholly exempt from labor, and
the muscular labor of the individual can produce little
more than enough to supply the necessities of him-
iself and family, it follows, that, in proportion as some,
n the distribution of wealth, acquire an excessive
share, others must receive less than the true ends of
physical well-being require. As the inequality tends
both to perpetuate itself and to increase more and
more, there will be constantly forming a large and
larger class whose poverty restricts them to a low
and imperfect and mere animal life ; whose discour-
agements tend to make them vicious ; whose ignor-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 127
ance, lack of self-control and physical necessities
render them the easy dupes and victims of unscru-
pulous "wealth, or unscrupulous intellect, and the
ready instruments of lying demagogues. These ten-
dencies to duality may l^e realized in varying forms
and in various degrees. We may find half of the
population, more or less, legal slaves of the rest, as
in ancient States and in our Southern States ; or the
same proportion practically slaves of capital, as in
modern European States, under the operation of the
laws of what is ironically called the " Science of
Political Economy," that is, without irony, under
the laws of unrestricted intellect in its natural rela-
tions to ignorance ; and of unrightous and unfeeling
wealth in its relations to poverty. Or we may find
these same tendencies in their earlier stages, as in
New England and other frte States. But always
and everywhere the final result, unless vigilantly
counteracted, will be, not only a duality of capital
and labor, but ultimately a political aristocracy which
will make the many subservient to the pleasure and
profit of the few.
What then is the remedy ? First of all a clear con-
ception of the highest end of the State. Which is
not, as would seem to be the opinion of professed
statesmen and political economists, the increase of
national wealth with very little regard to its distri-
bution. It is not the highest feat of statesmanship
to negotiate a new commercial treaty, to compel
trade with an unwilling people at the cannon's mouth,
to "open avenues to enterprise" so as to ''give em-
ployment to the laboring classes/'' to increase the
amount of labor by sending to the other side of the
planet, or of the continent, for what might be pro-
128 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
duced rt the doors of the consumers, to permit labor
to be wasted upon products injurious to both consum-
ers and producers, and in general to act on the as-
sumption that labor is good per se, and is to be m
every way increased.
On the contrary the true statesman would endeav-
or, by encouraging home, and local productions, by
incre?sing the facilities and diminishing the need of
transportation, by preventing hurtful and useless
production, by aiming to increase the efficiency and the
use of labor-saving machinery, by abating and coir pel-
ling to honest labor the innumerable loafers and para-
sites of society, by taxing all luxury and extravagance
by these and suchlike means he would endeavor not
to increase but to diminish the sum total of human
muscular labor necessary for an ample supply of all
the legitimate products of such labor, and so, to dim-
inish the daily labor of each individual and give time
for all to share in intellectual occupations and enjoy-
ments; that is, he would aim not at the largest sum to-
tal of wealth, but to promote the highest degree and
widest diffusion of human well-being to provide for
all the citizens of the State, and to preserve for them,
not only against the encroachments of others, but
often against themselves, the conditions of a complete
and worthy earthly life. It is obvious that, in order
to this, the principles of Christianity must be appli-
ed in detail, much more than hitherto they have been,
to all the legal relations of men, besides the infusion
of its spirit in the organic laws of the State. It is
still the pagan fashion to " approve the better and
follow the worse." We " declare" all men endowed
by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, to which
we immediately add, practically provided neverthe-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 129
less that many of them may, by unequal, or equal
laws, be deprived of these rights. But even Christ-
ian laws attempting to control an unchristian people
must of necessity to a great extent fail. Christian-
ity is essentially self-government, the law written on
the heart, for which coercion is always an imperfect
and often an impossible substitute. In the absence,
or in the delay of a pewading influence of Christ-
ianity thoughout the community, what laws can best
obviate the consequences of the natural differences of
men, can best protect all against the injustice of any
this is the problem of problems, this is for the
wisdom of the wise to determine.
It may not, perhaps, however, be beyond the reach
of ordinary discernment to make some suggestions,
to indicate some fundamental laws, and, in general,
the kind of policy by which the free State, at least
our own Republic, may so far counteract the tenden-
cies to inequality of wealth and intelligence, as cer-
tainly to avoid a fatal duality and consequent return
to aristocracy or despotism. First The Sources of
material wealth, Land, Mines, Fisheiies, all natural
productive agents, or, conditions of production, ought
to be carefully distinguished in their legal treatment,
from that wealth which is the product and embody-
ment of labor. The management of the domain of
tlie State is the truest test of statemanship. It is
certain from all history (or with fewest exceptions of
small commercial States) that with the possession of
the land goes the possession ot political power.
This is the very corner-stone of aristocracy. A free
State, therefore, should guard against the ever strong
tendency to this most dangerous monopoly by the
limitation of the right of property in land. The
130 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
limit may properly be different in different States,
and in the same State at different periods. In new
countries where land is plenty the freedom of pur-
chase may be less restricted, provided the purchase
'is made for cultivation and not for speculation, which
ought to be wholly prohibited. As population, wealth,
and the inequalities of wealth increase there is a con-
stant tendency to accumulations of the land, the large
farms absorbing on every side the smaller ones. This
is especially the case, for obvious reasons, in slave-
holding States.
Now, it is plain, that just in proprortion to the
largeness of these accumulations, this monopoly of the
source? of food, raiment, fuel and shelter, will be the
number of mere agricultural laborers : and that the
tendency will be to their reception of a smaller and
smaller proportion of the products of their labor, un-
til, as in England, they receive an inadequate supply
of the first necessaries of animal life ; or, as in our
cotton States, there is formed a class of landless, la-
borless, worthless "poor whites." Such are the
tendencies to be counteracted going directly towards
both social and political aristocracy. It will certain-
ly be the policy of a free State, a State for men,
whose aim is not national wealth but national well-
being, to have among its people the smallest possible
number of men wholly and permanently dependent
upon labor, who have no property but in the muscles
of their own bodies. A. class of such men in a free
State will inevitably be the victims of unscrupulous
capital, and the tools of uncrupulous politicians.
It is very damaging proof of how far we still are
from comprehending the meaning the word right-
ousness. in the New Testament sense, that in all the
THE AMERICAN RERUBLIC. ,181
States of Christendom, there is still a large population
not much better off than the old, " besfes en pare,"
now called "the laboring classes, "not because they lab-
or, but because their only possession is the faculty to
labor, and that these classes, whose muscles are the
condition and fountain of wealth are also often appro-
priately called " the laboring poor ;" that they are
often dependent for permission to labor, dependent
for condescending patronage, protection, and not un-
frequently much needed charity \ dependent even
for the privilege to come, anywhere, in contact with
their mother Earth, upon the good pleasure of those
whom the products of their labor have made rich.
In an aristocratic State this may be said to be the
natural relation of the producers of wealth to
the possessors of it. But in a self-organizing, self-
governing, and wise State estimating the production
of MEN higher than that of wealth, so dependent a
class, if it exists at all, ought to consist only of the
incorrigibly indolent and vicious. If, with us, at
least in the free States, this class is comparatively
small, whether in agriculture or other industries, let
us be careful to counteract the causes which here
also tend constantly to increase it.
In our own country the capabilities of the national
domain an so rich, various, and complete, as to ren-
der us, if we choose, for all the true ends of a State,
wholly independent of all other nations. The num-
ber of persons engaged in agriculture might, there-
fore, be in the natural proportion to those of the
other two great industrial employments, the mechan-
ical and the mercantile a number, probably, great-
er than that of both the others, or not far from half
of the whole population. This, with a judicious provi-
132 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
sion against accumulations of the land, would give,
not homeless laborers, not oppressed tenantry, peasan-
try, ryotry, or slaves, but a body of independent
and intelligent proprietors above the patronage ard
seductions of demagogues, who, in the exercise of
the most ordinary prudence and simple self-defence
of their own permanent interests, would defend the
State against all danger of domestic despotism ; and,
trained to the use of arms, could laugh at all foreign
enemies. This, it may be objected, is not the meth-
od by which the land could be made to yield *he
greatest amount of material wealth. Whether the
objection asserts the truth or not it can be valid only
for those who estimate higher the production of corn
and cotton than of men,
Second In order to still farther protection of the
less shrewd and energetic in this department of in-
dustry, a fundamental law of the State should re-
serve to every farmer, free from liability for debt or
mortgage except for the purchase money, a home-
stead, not of a certain value, but a certain quantity
of land (with its products) varying according to the
quality, with the farm buildings upon it if any, and
sufficient, under careful cultuvation, for the support
of a family. Such homestead should also be preserv-
ed entire, tRe proprietor not being permitted to sell
any part of it unless he sells the whole, that is the
law should protect him against himself as well as
against others. For it is among the duties of the
State to protect and govern those who are not cap-
able of self-protection and self-government. It is an
encouraging evidence of progress already commenc-
ed, of the existence of a public instinct in. the right
direction, that, while not long since the debtor was
TUB AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 133
stripped of all personal property, and his body im-
prisoned for a few dollars anciently even the dead
body of the debtor could be held from burial until
his debts were paid now, his body, his furniture,
the instruments of his occupation are free from seiz-
ure ; homesteads, are, in several States, begining to
be granted ; and, at least in regard to United States
land, unlimited purchase is forbidden.
Third To defend those engaged in mechanical
employments against the oppressions of capital, and
the injustices of superior intellect, is much more dif-
ficult. Every practical mechanic of whatever kind
should be entitled to the exemption of his house and
at least one acre of land ; the hours of daily labor
ought not to exceed eight, leaving time for mental
cultivation. The natural division of daily time and
occupations seems to be into three equal parts, eight
hours for muscular labor, eight for intellectual, and
eight for rest ; for a careful study of man's natural
relations to the sources of food and other things
needful for the animal life shows, that, with a just
distribution of muscular labor, and a just division of
its products, eight hours labor is sufficient for the
ample supply of all his physical necessities. If some-
men would not become any more intelligent by di-
minishing their hours of labor, this does not affect
the duty of the State to give all the opportunity ;
and in order to do this, besides instruction provided,
the accursed parasites who furnish temptations to
useless and hurtful expenditure of money and waste of
time ought to be exterminated with the most relent-
less severity. A wise State would aim also to
preserve the natural proportion of mechanics to those
in other employments by a judicious regulation of
134 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
manufactures so as to prevent excess and consequent
injurious competition of laborers, and, as far as pos-
sible, uncertainties and fluctuations of market.
True national independence requires the home
production and home manufacture, as far as the nat-
ural resources of the country permit, of everything
necessary to national well-being and self defence.
Our own country is happily competent to furnish
everything whatever desirable for these ends ; and
should therefore, be, and remain, in the fullest sense
of the word, independent. Certainly to this extent
of entire self-reliance and self-sufficiency should pro-
duction of material and manufactures be protected
against foreign competition ; to this extent they
should be established and have the monopoly of the
home market, notwithstanding any necessary but
temporary increase of prices. Thus provided, a great
nation is essentially invulnerable from without. The
blockade of their ports would be a matter of entire
indifference. The lack of preparation, making war
in the absence of the means of self-reliance, was the
fatal mistake of the Confederate States. If permitted
to preserve slavery they will be better provided next
time. The State, then, should manufacture every-
thing necessary for its own defence, and for the supply
of its home markets, developing its own resources
and its own skill.
Should the free State manufacture for foreign
markets? It should not, since it would be contra-
dictory to the true policy of the free State by
throwing into that department of industry an unnat-
ural proportion of laborers who would be liable at
any time to become a class of dependent and helpless
operatives ; for foreign markets are not only fluctu-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 135
ating but may at any moment through commercial or
political disturbances fail altogether. Manufacturers
on the contrary, having command of the home mar-
ket, would soon bring their profits to the average of
those of other employments ; and having a compara-
tively certain and reliable market, would be unlikely
to create an unfortunate surplus of manufacturing
labor. The danger from depending upon foreign
markets and foreign material is well illustrated by
the present condition of some European manufac-
tures. Our country, complete in itself, may be,
and ought to be, indifferent to the commercial policy
of other nations. Whether the two antagonist classes
of employers and operatives, so liable to produce ex-
tremes, both disastrous, of wealth and poverty, may
not be dispensed with, by practical mechanics associ-
ating and furnishing each both capital and labor, and
dividing the income, is a question which they seem
about to consider. Such a class of manufacturers,
soon becoming intelligent and independent, would
furnish no tools for demagogues, and confining them-
selves to home markets, would be for the free State
among the most reliable of its citizens.
Of the three great industrial departments of the
State, and sources of material wealth, the three great
organs of supply for man's physical necessities which
ought to be carefully restrained each to its appropri-
ate function, Commerce, foreign commerce, is far
the most likely to be active out of due proportion, to
be in excess. Especially is this the case in this
country from the great extent of its maritime border.
This "Interest" is extremely liable to become a
Self-interest, and to forget that it is only an organ of
the Commonwealth. Statesmen, of the near-sight-
136 THB AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
ed species, whose highest end is Ct national wealth/'
are always patrons of commerce, and seek and make
treaties with special reference to it. The people, too,
are delighted with the ever ready declamations of
" our sails whitening every sea," and " our flag dis-
played in every port." The consequence is, that,
soon, Commerce becomes a domineering imperium
in imperio, sacrificing the common wealth to the
commercial interest. For this interest forbids, or
may forbid, the proportionate, the natural develop-
ment of agriculture, mining and manufactures, that
is, of those natural resources of the country which
are the only sources of true national independence
and safety. The power of the Class is maintained by
the influence of the vulgar Political Economy of
" free trade," good, it may be, for small, insular,
shop-keeping States like England, provided she can
succeed in controlling the markets of the world ; and
if the largest sum total of accumulated wealth is the
highest end of the State and by the taking and effi-
cient sophistry that protection of home-manufactures,
and of home-production of raw material, would cer-
tainly very much increase cost to consumers. Thus
by the terror of high prices, which would be but mo-
mentary, their monopolies and their own prices are
preserved. The true interest of the Commonwealth,
on the contrary, requires that foreign Commerce
should be but the complement <& the other industrial
activities, supplying such useful things as the coun-
try itself cannot produce, such luxuries not necessary
to physical well-being, as a wise State would admit,
and exporting the surplus of agricultural products.
The spirit of Commerce has been always and every-
where one of injustice and oppression towards the
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 137
weak abroad, and, of course, of selfishness and mo-
nopoly at home. In a State where commerce is not
restrained within its proper sphere, the spirit of
trade, stimulated by frequent instances of the rapid
acquisition of wealth ; not very rarely of immense
wealth, giving splendor and title to " merchant
princes ;" exciting great numbers by the hope of
similar good fortune this spirit of speculation, and
impatience of quiet industry pervade all the business
of society, and instead of choosing a life-long employ-
ment as the necessary means for the animal life, and
the condition of that without which our life is of no
more worth than that of animals, intellectual and
spiritual good, men give themselves body and soul to
the one end of making haste to be rich, richer, rich-
est. This same spirit even invades agriculture. The
farmer, instead of seeking to make for himself a
delightful home, to restore, as he only can, so much
as remains possible of the lost paradise, gratifying
his affections and his taste by every beautiful and
beautified aspect of the spot of earth he calls his own,
making it both means and end for the humanity
within him instead of these human feelings and
rational aims he looks upon his potential Eden as
mere land, which he regards only as the instrument
of gain, impatient of a culture in which he might
make his daily labor a series of scientific experiments,
and restless to find the most immediately profitable
crops, in the very spirit of traffic, he makes haste to
be rich. Commerce, moreover, produces what is
especially to be avoided in a free State, extremes of
wealth and poverty. Employing great numbers of
laborers, mere operatives of the lowest kind, it cre-
ates a mass of unassimilated and unassimilable ma-
138 TUB AMERICAN .REPUBLIC.
terial in the vitals of the body politic to be a nuisance,
a disease and a danger to the life of the State.
Hence large commercial cities are the hot-beds of
luxury, vice, crime, demagogueism, and of worse
than Athenian democracy, a reproach, and to out-
side observers, a despair of the Republican State.
Besides the essential normal organs of the State,
there are certain instruments more or less made use
of by most governments, convenient for some purpos-
es, but often of doubtful expediency, and which, if
used at all, ought to be kept as generally they are
not most rigidly under control. The government
has no right to bestow upon others the privilege to
do, practically upon their own terms, what its own
duty requires it to do upon the best possible terms
for the public good. The fewer the intermediate
agents, the more direct and effective the accountability
to the principal. If the immediate personal agents
of the government are found to be corrupt they are
immediately responsible to the government, and the
government, if it does not punish them, to the peo-
ple ; but chartered instruments contrive to evade
indefinitely responsibility to either. As to such
corporate monopolies, those daughters of the horse-
leech, it is to be hoped that a little more experience
of them may prove sufficient. It is fortunate that
they are ultimately in the power of those upon whose
blood they are fattening, and it were well that they
be dealt with after the manner of treating others of
the leech tribe stripped.
Every dollar of the vast sums with which certain
Railroad and other Corporations control, to a great
extent, the elections, the legislation and the courts of
the States from which they receive their charters,
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 139
besides being the product of labor for which no
equivalent was given, is a contribution by the com-
munity to a corruption-fund for its own demoraliza-
tion. Every dollar of the millions with which the
gamblers of Wall Street and of other Streets de-
range business, embarrass the government, degrade
and disgrace the commercial character of the country,
and finally devour one another would that they
could be treated as the bees treat the drones of their
society all these vast sums, the product of labor,
have been taken from the producers by contract or
by force and contracts may be equally compulsory
with slavery itself in such proportion, in the great
majority of cases, that the laborer received only
sufficient for the lowest animal life, and to enable
him to continue the use if not the enjoyment of his
only possession, the muscles of his own body. These
muscles may have belonged to the sailor and along-
shore man ; to the sewing girl who makes shirts at
six cents apiece ; to the slave in the rice swamp or
cotton field ; to the English operative, or the Irish
tenant ; to the cultivator of coffee under Dutch op-
pressions in Java ; to the producer of pepper on
compulsion in Sumatra, or his who for the same
reason delivers to the English landlord so many
pounds of opium to the acre in India to be forced up-
on the Chinese in order to the civilization which we
are told commerce always carries along with it. An
autobiography by each dollar of a millionaire's heap
would be instructive reading ; and if stolen property
never loses its character by transfer, on due claim by
the rightful owners, how much of the million would
be left on which no taint of injustice could be found ?
These views, doubtless, would be pronounced
140 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
heterodox by statesmen of the popular laisscz
faire, free trade school, whose doctrine is that all
individual men, all Interests, and all Nations are to
he left to unlimited and unrestrained competition,
each, in relation to others, to he entitled to whatever
any relative advantage may give, and to whatever
may he acquired hy bargain or treaty, no matter un-
der what conditions of comparative strength or
weakness of brain, under what compulsion of necessi-
ty, lack of self-control, or other coercion short of
highway robbery. Indeed, in regard to nations they
may, it seems, demand commercial treaties, and com-
pel the fulfilment of them at the cannon's mouth ;
which is, however, no more efficient or unjust coercion
than is often practiced by individuals, and Interests
of the same nation towards each other. '
But THE STATE is more than an aggregation of
individuals, each by himself and for himself, unre-
strained in relation to others except by a general
rule forbidding assault and battory ; it is more than
an aggregation of Interests each of which may aim
exclusively at self-interest. The State is an OR-
GANISM, in which each organ has its appropriate and
natural function, not only in relation to itself, but to
each of the other organs, and to the well-being of the
whole body politic. In other organisms, excess or
deficiency or perversion of the function, whether of
one or of several organs, is disease, and this de-
rangement, if considerable and continued, is fatal
disease. In the human body, when each or any of
the lower organs claims to be the best judge of its
own interests, and in disobedience to that to which
supremacy belongs, and in insurrection against the
common good of the organism, seeks only its own
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 141
self-indulgence, all the organs soon perish together.
This is more than a metaphorical illustration of the
relations of the great industrial and educational In-
terests of the State to each other, to the government
which should wisely preside over them, and to the
common well-being ; for the State is not less an or-
ganism than is each of the bodies of its citizens, and
essentially the same organic laws are ordained for
both, with the same consequences of their violation.
In irrational organisms all the organs co-operate in-
stinctively, without mutual antagonism, under a
divine guidance, towards the true ends of the organ-
ism. But in the human body, much more in the
political organism, this spontaneous divine harmony
does not exist, and upon the man, and the govern-
ment, is thrown the difficult and often neglected or
abused prerogative and responsibility of maintaining
it. Laisscz faircj in both cases, is not merely fail-
ure of the true end, but derangement, disease and
death. An overgrown commercial Interest may not
only interfere to prevent the development of manu-
factures, of the agricultural, mining and other natu-
ral resources of the country necessary to its true
independence, but it may continue and render per-
manent this one sided and unsafe development, either
through public opinion, by subsidizing the press to
propagate the sophistries of free trade, by the em-
ployment of demagogues to manipulate elections, or
through the direct control of the government itself
by means too often with all governments effective.
So the excessive development of manufactures,
that is, manufactures working for, and dependent
upon foreign markets, may not only disturb the do-
mestic health of the State in the way already spoken
142 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
of, but may seduce the government into treaties and
even wars for the supposed benefit of the manufac-
turing interest though hostile to the true interests of
the Commonwealth. Thus the " Manufacturing In-
terest" also may become an aggressive and domineer-
ing power, aiming at the conquest of the markets of
the world. The methods of acquiring and retaining
such conquests exhibit often the most selfish' and very
basest qualities of humanity, and, like those of other
aristocracies, they are not only frequently unjust and
oppressive towards the conquered, but are sure to
result ultimately in disaster to their own country.
Certainly a wise State will not permit a large pro-
portion of its population to become exposed to the
danger at any time, we may say to the certainty, by
and by, of being deprived of their daily bread by any
of the proverbially fluctuating conditions of universal
trade, or the vicissitudes of universal politics. In
which case hundreds of thousands of men, as now in
England, may have to be fed by what is facetiously
called "charity;" that is, to have the product of
their own labor doled out to them to the great credit
of the philanthrophy of those who have been enriched
by it ; or else the State must go to war, as perhaps
England will, for the purpose of recovering what the
manufacturing interest may have lost.
There never was a country so complete in itself
as the American Republic, so wholly free from all
necessary dependence upon foreign nations. Its nat-
ural resources are ample for the supply of everything
which can be desired in order to the protection, the
material wealth, and the physical well-being of the
State. There needs, in order to a more than hither-
to ever anywhere attained national felicity, only that
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 143
the people and the government seek wisely, not na-
tional wealth, but, in the high and Christian sense,
national well-being. There needs, not a pagan and
"stationary" morality, but the application of Chris-
tian principles to all the relations of man to man, of
Interest to Interest, of State to State, and of the
nation to all other nations. Whether a false and
unrightous principle can be safely left among the or-
ganic laws of the State to work out its natural re-
sult under the expectation that by and by it will
die out our present war can answer. Slavery im-
plies the fatal pagan duality, which is. of necessity,
if left to itself, ultimately destructive of both its ex-
tremes. The effects of slavery are to subject its vic-
tims to failure of all the ends of the earthly human
life, and to degrade, demoralize and paganize the mas-
ters, a retributive consequence to one party involved
in their injustice towards the other. But the basis
of slavery is deeper than the legal enactment
that A. B. C. etc. may be held and treated as the
chattels ot D. or whoever shall purchase them. The
same principles controling or permitting the rela-
tions of man to man, which, in some modern States
as they aid in all ancient ones have resulted in
legal slavery these same principles still everywhere
unextinguished, and more or less operative in all
States, always, in proportion to their activity, tend
towards a duality subversive of the ends of the true
Commonwealth, and if unrestrained, must result, by
a natural law, in aristocracy, slavery, or some other
form of despotism. So long and so far as the natur-
al and acquired mental and moral differences of men
are disregarded in legislation and there is permitted
free competition of all in regard to the acquisition of
144 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
material wealth, and even of the very sources of
wealth, unrestrained in its methods except as to the
use of physical force, while at the same time the many
are left to their natural indolence in regard to intel-
lectual acquisitions, what ever has been, and what
ever can be until men have become angels the
result but a monopoly of the land and other primary
sources of wealth, the unequal and unjust division
of the products of muscular labor, the secondary
great source of material property, great accumula-
tions of wealth and developed intellect in posession
of the comparatively few, and correlatively great
poverty and ignorance in possession of the many ?
But this is ARISTOCRACY, social, intellectual, and
political, not less and not better where there is still
retained the formality of universal suffrage and
nominal freedom which, however, will not be long
retained under such circumstances than where the
government is in the hands of an hereditary oligar-
chy backed by standing armies. The mother vice
here, prolific of all these consequences fatal to the
free State, is the admission into, or rather the failure
to exclude from the legislation of the State, principles
which necessarily result, not in the unequal merely,
but the unjust distribution of the natural sources of
wealth and of the products of labor ; for from this
all the rest follows logically and inevitably. As in
the old pagan world physical superiority, through
robbery, piracy, war, appropriated the product of
other men's labor and made the weaker the legal
slaves of the stronger ; so in modern civilization in-
tellectual superiority inscribed with the same old
motto " might makes right," is permitted, by paral-
lel means, under other names, to work towards es-
sentially similar results.
THE AMERICAN KEFUBLIC. 145
Have then our governments State and Kational
done nothing to counteract this inherent tendency of all
human States towards a natural and essentially pa-
gan dualism ? much, most of them, by Declara-
tion] by legislation, much, some of them, others
nothing. Examples of the different results are seen
in Massachusetts and South Carolina. But even in
the best States this tendency is only more or less
counteracted. The principle which always develops
itself in this direction is still left everywhere active.
It is to some extent instinctively Jelt, it seems to be
nowhere distinctly perceived, that, laissez faire is
not less false or less unjust when applied to brain
than when applied to muscles, in regard to which it
was long ago at least as between individuals and
guilds discarded. Christianity has been, indeed
as already shown and is, everywhere, except in
some parts proh pudor ! of the United States,
counteracting and modifying the legitimate results of
this principle, but if we, some of us, seem to have
resisted them more successfully than other nations,
let us thank God for a fertile and wide country,
which has hitherto prevented monopoly of land and
a crowded population, so that the great problem of
capital and labor, far from being practically solved
by us of the North, has hardly yet began to press
upon us for solution. Hitherto, among all nations,
the claim of capital that its power is the proper meas-
ure of its right have I not a right to do what I can
with mine own? has been practically admitted. If
there have been protests against the abuse of this power
and attempts of legislation to control it they have met
with small success. It is a power of all others most un-
scrupulous, and most difficult, it may be said impos-
13
146 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
Bible wholly to restrain, and yet a power whose con-
trol is indispensable to the safety and well-being of
the free State. The usual stereotype answer to this
view of the subject is easy to be repeated, with ridi-
cule of the author's ignorance of "The Science of
Political Economy." It is easy to assert that the re-
lations of capital and labor are those of mutual de-
pendence and mutual advantage. This is very true,
for the reason that capital must use the muscles of
others because it has none of its own, and muscles
are indispensable to the production of wealth ; and
for the reason that labor cannot use its own muscles
without asking leave of capital. And this is so by
reason not only of the unequal but the unjust dis-
tribution of wealth ; and of the monopoly by wealth
of the "natural agents " which are the condition of
productive muscular labor, the sources, in combination
with labor, of food and of all material on which la-
bor is expended. Since the muscles of the individual,
even in his natural relations to his mother Earth,
can produce little more than enough for his own nec-
essary consumption, it follows that accumulation of
wealth must be by appropriating the products of other
muscles than those of the owners of such wealth ; and
that all large accumulations of wealth imply correla-
tive poverty. The greater the accumulated wealth
and the law of wealth is increase in a geometri-
cal ratio the greater the poverty, and the greater the
number of those whose only possession is their own
muscles, and consequently the greater the competition
for the privilege of employment of such muscles.
The habit of accumulated capital to retire from the
labor-market greatly increases this competition. The
result and consummation of the operation of these
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 147
causes, accumulation and monopoly, is well seen in
the condition of English agricultural laborers and ot
manufacturing, mining and mercantile operatives, and
in the million and more of English paupers, who are
wholly excluded from the privilege of competition for
labor, not even permitted to sweep their own rooms,
or to wash their own rags, because this labor is de-
manded by those who are still outside, and struggling
to keep outside of the poor-house.
England offers good illustrations of the effects ot
obedience to the laws of Political Economy. In forty-
five years, from 1770 to 1815, the number of pro-
prietors in England and Wales diminished from
250,000 to 32,000. What has been going on since
may be learned from recent English authorities.
' ' Fifty years ago, farms were very much smaller,
and much more numerous than at present. Besides
this, there were many small farms in every county
of England and Wales, which belonged to the farmers
themselves. But all this class of yeomanry farmers
have disappeared."
" The greater proprietors are buying up all the
land they can get hold of. Whenever one of the
small estates is put up for sale, the great proprietors
outbid the peasants and purchase it at all costs. The
consequence is, that the number of small estates has
been rapidly diminishing in all parts of the country.
In a short time none of them will remain." As this
kind of accumulation has been going on since 1815,
when the proprietors were only 32,000, we may sup-
pose that they are now not far from 20,000.
In the mean time the English peasant, become al-
together a u hind," or day-laborer, finds himself at
the bottom of a long series of middle-men between
148 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
himself and iny lord, the proprietor, whose rent, not
only, but the profits of all the intermediate operators
are to come out of his muscles. How much of the
product of his labor is left for himself, and what is
his condition physically and mentally, one may con-
jecture, but 1 doubt whether any imagination can
come up to the reality of its horrors without the aid
of description, for which, see Colman's "Agricultural
Reports,' 7 and " The Social Condition of the English
People", Kay.
These descriptions remind one of the condition of
the French peasantry, "bestes en pare," just before
the Revolution See Arthur Young's "Travels in the
Kingdom of France."
The social disease, there, called for and received
"heroic treatment." Does the English aristocracy
mean to wait for similar remedies ? Perhaps retri-
butive justice may require them to do so.
But, it might be well for us of the American Re-
public who have had already some experience of re-
tributive justice to remem'ber that these and other
such like results of the right of unlimited property
in land are all in strict obedience to the laws of science,
The Science, of Political Economy, that these laws
are in operation here also, and that in all the older
States they are tending in the same direction towards
similar consequences.
The natural effect of a monopoly of the land, and
of aristocratic landlordism is also admirably exhibit-
ed in Ireland, as described by the Rev. Mr. Colman
in his Agricultural Reports.
' c I never saw a more beautiful country. * * * *
But the wretchedness of the great mass of the popu-
lation is utterly beyond all description. I have been
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
into cabins dug out of the bog, with no walls but
the peat mud in which they have been excavated,
with the roof covered with turf and straw, and the
water standing in puddles on the outside, without
chimney, window, door, floor, bed, chair, table, knife
or fork ; the whole furniture consisting of some straw
to lie down upon, a pot to boil the potatoes in, a tin
cup to drink out of, and a wicker basket to take up
the potatoes in after they are boiled, which is set
down in the middle of the floor, and parents and
children squat down, like Hottentots, on the ground,
and eat their food with their fingers, sometimes with
salt and often without ; and this is literally the
whole of their living, day after day, and year after
year, excepting that on Christmas day they contrive
to get a little piece of meat and a bit of bread. You
will be curious to know if I have seen many living
so yes, hundreds hundreds ? yes, thousands
thousands ? yes, a million. I would hardly credit
my own senses until I went into the cabins, and felt
my way in the smoke ahd darkness, and actually
put my hand upon the turf sides. Here they all lie
down, parents, children, brothers and sisters, on the
straw at night, huddled together, literally naked be-
cause, the Irish . coachman said if they s wore
their shirts they were afraid they would be stol-
en."
But English hinds and Irish tenants are not the
only victims of British "national wealth." Large
accumulations cf capital, the separation of capital
and labor, and of brain and muscles, that is the mo-
nopoly of wealth and of intelligence, have, in Eng-
land, an effect upon the condition of the operatives in
the other great industries similar to that of the mono-
150 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
poly of the land upon the agricultural laborers. In
some respects the manufacturing and mercantile
operatives and the unutterable dregs of the great
commercial towns are worse off than the laborers in
the field. At least they are more affected by fluctua-
tions of trade. Should we of the free States be will-
ing to see, here, a population like that of England
and Wales, one-halt of which can neither read nor
write, one-eighth of which are paupers, and half as
many more are half-paupers ? "VVe have only to
yield loyal obedience, for a little while, to the laws
of laissez faire political economy until they produce
similar monopoly of the land, and similar accumula-
tions of wealth when we shall have similar correla-
tive pauperism, similar consequent ignorance and sim-
ilar dregs in the great towns, as witness New York
tenement-houses already it is the rich, the accumu-
lators of land and of capital, who object to paying
their proportion of school-taxes, who, having, as they
think, made sure of their own, are very indifferent
to the public welfare. If there are many exceptions
here to the general character of the class, as there are
also in the political aristocracy, this does not affect
the general fact that successful acquisitiveness still
grows by what it feeds on and renders its victim
grasping, selfish and narrow-minded. With excess-
ive wealth and consequent excessive poverty and ig-
norance comes, of course, excess of the "working
classes," and what does Political Economy propose
to do with these, its legitimate offspring ?
The Malthusian remedy is prescribed in England
for the plethoric condition of labor, but the patient
declines to take it. A popular American treatise on
Political Economy also assures laborers that the re-
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 151
medy for competition and low wages is in their own
hands they have only to cease propagating, or to
propagate " prudently," so as to keep the number of
laborers well under the demand of capital. This
plan, with a careful statistician in the employ of the
laborers, would, doubtless, work admirably were it
not for the unlucky fact that increasing monopoly
and accumulating capital beget laborers much faster
than the laborers themselves can do it, even without
11 prudence."
Even the pious Chalmers asserts "that there is no
other method by which wages can be kept permanent-
ly high than by the moral preventive check among
the working classes of society." That is, the laborer
must keep so posted in regard to the population of
his class as to be able, at all time?, to determine
whether it would be prudent to invite more laborers
into this crowded world to compete, by and by, with
himself and then his prudence must never be off
guard !
But, lest the landlords and capitalists should ob-
ject to this prudent information offered to the " work-
ing classes," Mr. Chalmers assures them that "such
is the strength of the principle of population that
there is no danger but wages will be kept sufficient-
ly low." It seems, then, that the " moral preventive
check," and k the strength of the principle" of pop-
ulation are so to counterbalance each other as to sat-
isfy both laborers and landlords. This is the protec-
tion which Political Economy offers to labor against
capital, or rather to muscles against brain.*
* See Appendix.
152 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
But, as this plan has failed hitherto, what other re-
ihedy remains than that towards which Christianity
silently tends and at which legislation ought constant-
ly to aim, which is, not merely to control the power
of capital but to diminish it. The power of capital
for evil is either in the character of it, as where it
monopolizes the land or other sources of wealth as
in England ; or in large accumulations of it by which
it causes and controls a vast amount of labor, render-
ing the laborers progressively more and more exclu-
sively dependent upon it, reducing them to mere op-
eratives subject to the consequences of all the fluctu-
ations of trade, commerce and politics, as in English
manufactures, and by which it may even control
public opinion and government itself; or in its per-
version to purposes at the same time injurious to the
interest, health and morals of the commnnity, as in
the conversion of bread-corn into alcoholic drinks ;
or in combinations or other methods to control prices ;
and, in general, in the disjunction, separation of cap-
ital and labor, so that they become antagonist inter-
ests : while, at the same time, it increases in all me-
chanical employments, the proportion, of mere labor-
ers. Here are the elements of a dualism whose ex-
tremes tend ever wider asunder and which naturally
by producing excess of labor extends itself to
all kinds of business. It is plain, as has been before
shown, that the consequences of this tendency unre-
stricted must be ultimately fatal to the free State.
Just as in the political dualism the effect of Chris-
tianity is to elevate the lower extreme, and to dimin-
ish more and more the power of the aristocracy, until
the extremes meet, in the true Republic, in a political
unity, so the power of the dominant and tyrannous
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
153
extreme in the business duality must be diminished,
and the extremes made to approach each other imtii
they meet in the fusion and unity of capital aud la-
bor. As the business-aristocracy is but a lesser de-
gree of political aristocracy, in which, if left to it-
self it ultimately ends, so the same causes which
limit the power of the one limit that of the other
also. But as the aristocracy of capital is first in
the order of time, so, for obvious reasons, it will ever
be the last to be deprived of its power. Yet the
principles of Christianity applied progressively more
and more in detail to the business relations of men ;
a deeper sense of relative justice and of the meaning
of the command " thou shalt not steal;" a larger and
wider diffusion of intelligence and of moral influences
among laborers : wiser statesmen and wiser public
opinion in regard to the true ends of the State ; the
prohibition of accumulations of land ; le^al protec-
tion of homesteads ; the preservation of due propor-
tion among the great industrial organs of the State
these measures and others of the same tendency, each
of which Christianity demands and will ultimately in-
sist upon cannot fail to result in a more and more just
distribution of wealth, that is, a larger and larger pro-
portion of it to those whose labor has produced it; thus
at the same time preventing large accumulations of
capital in the hands of a few, and dividing it widely
among the many, so that whatever amount of capital
may be required for any legitimate business can be fur-,
nished by the laborers themselves, and in all the great
industries of the State the separate classes of employ-
ers and employes cease to exist. Thus , while the
power of capital for evil, where it has been most ab-
used, both in regard to individuals and to the State,
154 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
will be taken away, its power for good will be vastly
increased. So, in Christ's Name, may there be in-
terpreted another chapter of His gospel to the poor,
and the problem of capital and labor be resolved.
Towards this consummation devoutly to be wished, if
our Constitutions, and our legislation hitherto have
done little directly, there is now at least an embryo
public opinion, and beginnings of legislation, though
crude, with a looking of laborers in the right direc-
tion, which give assurance that when the end is dis-
tinctly seen the means will not be wanting.
The aristocratic side of this duality does not,
however, yield its long, unbroken and all but un-
questioned sway without a struggle. It is even more
tenacious of power than political and ecclesiastical
aristocracies . In most countries the people have gone
further in limiting the tyranny of Church and State
despotisms than " the working classes' in restraining
the power of capital. If the French people had, be-
fore the Revolution, gained something in respect to
life and liberty, since the tenth century ; if political
aristocracy had been deprived of some of its power;
the aristocracy of wealth, the monopoly of land, with
the prescriptive droits of the Seigneurs and of the
Church rendered the physical condition of the pea-
santry little less deplorable and hopeless than that of
serfdom. So the English people have gained im-
mensely, in the same period, in their civil and politi-
cal relations to the government and aristocracy, and
especially in their relations to the church, yet surely,
the villeins of the old Normans must all have per-
ished if they had been physically worse off than
their descendants the present villeins of capital and
monopoly.
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 155
However variously modified, and adapted, the
power of capital, essentially the same, has always
been retained. Or if it has seemed to yield in
one direction it has been to be more aggressive in
another. Now, and here, in our own country, it
has undertaken to resume all, in form and sub-
stance, and principle, of what it claims to be its an-
cient, natural and divine rights. Hence comes irre-
pressible and bloody conflict. The South, backed by
the sympathies and material aid of all the old politi-
cal, ecclesiastical, commerical, manufacturing and
landed aristocracries, proclaims, in the name of Satan
and paganism: CAPITAL SHALL OWN LABOR. The
North, by its princples, in its feelings, and more
and more in its conscious purpose and its legislation,
with the sympathy of every people, and the prayers
of all Christians and believers in rightousness, says
no ! but in the name of God and of Christianity :
LET LABOR OWN CAPITAL. Here are a pair of an-
tagonist principles the most antagonstic of all antag-
onisms. They have come in conflict not now for the
first time nor will this be the last. This is in fact
the conflict of all ages and of all States. In the
triumphs of the first of these principles, of which
slavery is only one of the protean forms, are the
sources and strength of all other aristocracies and
despotisms. The triumph of the second will be, in
relation to the State, the ultimate and crowning
triumph of Christianity, and the complete realization
of the true Republic, the true Commonwealth.
If, in this brief review of the Organic Laws and
the legislation of The American Republic, it appears
but as a poor and thin " Shadow of Christianity,"
which has not yet availed to heal all our diseases, a
156 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
very imperfect realization of the principles of Chris-
tianity applied to the State ; if our early statesmen
did not yet see clearly all that Christianity requires
of the State, yet it is, and will be, glory enough for
them, the pioneers of the Republic, to have uttered
the principles of the Declaration of Independence,
the true interpretation, so far, of Christianity ap-
plied to politics ; and what a leaven, next after the
divine leaven of Christianity itself, not only in the
politics of the Republic, but in the hearts and hopes
of the people of all nations. If the Republic has not
yet realized even the principles of the Declaration,
which are little more than prohibitive, and far short
of the positive demands of Christianity, yet that their
leaven has not been idle, witness, in regard to almost
the only legal violation of them, their ever more and
more irrepressible, and more and more victorious
conflict with slavery. If there are still, even in the
free States, principles not yet wholly discarded,
which always result in practical injustice and tend to
political inequality, it is much, very much, to have
got rid of all hereditary political aristocracy, mostly
of prelatic domination, and especially of the combi-
nation and conspiracy of the two, that fountain of
the corruption and perversion of Christianity and of
the practical enslavement of the bodies end souls of
the people ; and much more is it to have arrived at
earnest discussion ot the method, and at the deter-
mination to find the method, by which to put an end
to the tyranny of capital over labor. If occupations
are still permitted in some States which are fountains
of poverty and vice and cr'me,it is something that pub-
lic opinion has declared war against them, and that,
though backed, some of them, by unrighteously
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 157
acquired wealth, their abatement is only a question
of time. If there is still, even in New England,
some ignorance in regard to the most elementary
learning, this is almost wholly the product of Euro-
pean aristocracies, and it is something that the means
of education are provided, as in all the other non-
glaveholding States, and offered freely to every
child. Let us hope that it will soon be the duty of
somebody, under penalty, to see that these provisions
are, in every case, made efficient. In general, if, in
many respects, the Republic has failed hitherto to
realize fully the true idea of a Commonwealth, it is
much, that, while the consequences of imperfect leg-
islation are provided for, or at least alleviated, by
private liberality, public opinion demands more and
more that the sources also of evil be attacked. And;
herein is a great advantage of the self-governing,
Belt-educating State, that the good and the wise may
follow the method of Christianity, lay the axe to the
root of the tree ; while, in aristocracies, they can
only dip at the streams of evil of which misorganiza-
tion and misgovernment are the ever-flowing foun-
tains If the Republic is still far from its ideal, it is
something that it is moving in that direction, and
that, in its practical results. for slavery is but an
incubus inherited from Aristocracy, foreign to the
Republic, and being rapidly thrown off it is far IB
advance of all other nations.
If there must be a wider and deeper infusion of
the salt of Christianity, it is something, that, besides
the increasing practical piety of Christian men and
women, and besides a more general and more sincere
recognition and awe of God's hand controling the af-
fairs of men when, before, were political meetings
H
158 THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.
opened with prayer, and closed with the Doxology ?
besides this the clergy, universally, even that class
which like other aristocracies has hitherto inclined to
be ''conservative" of evil, even they, with the
exception of now and then a paganized bishop, are
preaching more and more fully and earnestly the
true principles and doctrines of the New Testament.
Have we, therefore, occasion for discouragement ? or
have we not rather for hope, that, taught, by our own
present experience, the just consequences of admit-
ting an unrighteous principle into our fundamental
laws, we shall eliminate from them, not only that
which is the cause of our present disaster and dishon-
or, but all others of like character, and be on our
guard hereafter that no more such be admitted. So,
if we are capable of learning by experience, may
our present punishment be greatly to our future
amendment.
Let us hope, then, and pray and labor, and be
confident, that, notwithstanding our own imperfec-
tions, and in spite of the malevolence of those who
hate because they envy and tear us, even with the
filthy stream ever inevitably flowing in upon us from
the aristocratic fountains of Europe, let us not doubt
that the American Republic shall yet apprehend
clearly, and realize, fully as the perverseness of man
permits, the true ends of the human State, and so
attain to " the utmost perfection of which it is capa-
ble according to its rank and kind."
APPENDIX.
While these sheets are going through the pros-.s, I have pro-
cured a copy of the latest edition of John Stuart Mill's " Princi-
ples of Political Economy," and am happy to find that, on several
important points, especially in their " Applications to Social
Philosophy," his principles nearly or quite coincide with, and
sustain by his great authority, the opinions indicated in tho
chapter of this treatise on "The American ;.u'puHic."
He advocates free trade in land. Vet his principles imply li-
mitation of quantity in both directions. For he thinks an un-
expected opinion in an Englishman that production is increased
by small farms, and also a much more important point that
the intellectual, moral and social character of small proprietors,
as well as their physical well-being, is superior to that of agri-
cultural laborers. If there is tendency to division of land for
agriculture of which he thinks there is little danger beyond
a quantity sufficient for the support of a family, he advises legal
restraint. Indeed he would place the land wholly in the power
of the State without regard to private ownership. "When the
* sacredness of property' is talked of, it is to be remembered,
that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to
landed property. No man made the lam). It is the original in-
heritance of the whole species. The appropriation is wholly a
question of expediency. The claim of the landowners to the land
is altogether subord nate to the general policy of the State. The
principle of property gives them no right to the land, but only a
right to compensation for whatever portion of their interest in the
land it may be the policy of the State to deprive them of."
This is certainly sufficiently radical treatment of the land, and
gives the State power to limit ownership in all directions. That
it should be limited in the direction of too much is as desirable as
it is that it should be cultivated by many proprietors instead of
hordes of mere agricultural laborers. That there is a tendency
to hurtful accumulations of the land, and therefore need of limi-
tation by the State, is proved by the history of its distribution
among all nations. We have only to call to mind the relation of
160 APPENDIX.
the cultivators to the land in Asia, the " latifu\dia' * of the Ro-
man Senators, half the land of Europe th% property of the church
in the middle ages, ownership in England, &c. Or, if it be said
that these are results of obsolete civilizations, we may see the
same tendency in this country in spite of perfectly free trade in
land and equal division among heirs, where, not only in the late
slave States, but in the free, and even in New England the pro-
portion of laborers to proprietors is on the increase. There is a
gratification to the pride of wealth in being lord of the soil be-
sides the social and political influence whi h goes along with it.
Even the vulgar rich like to sport their parks and drives, not be-
cause they know how to enjoy them, but because they fancy that
they confer a patrician air upon their possessors.
In regard to accumulations of wealth, his doctrines, though
eminently just, would be reckoned over-radical even in Massa-
chusetts. He sees " no reason why collateral inheritance should
exist at all." The property in case of intestacy " should escheat
to the State." The interests of children, he thinks, would be bet-
ter consulted by a moderate than by a large provision. This,
therefore, is all that is due to them from the parent, or from the
State in case the parent dies intestate. Even the power of be-
'quest should be subject to limitation.
His plan of " raising a class of small proprietors" by dividing
"".common land" "into sections of five acres each or there-
abouts, to be conferred in absolute property on individuals of the
laboring class who would reclaim and bring them into cultiva-
tion by their own labor" ; and to make these small estates if ne-
cessary " indivisible by law" this plan is a very near approach
to the true idea of a homestead
He does not join tne Bishops in exhorting slaves and other
*' laboring poor" to " be content with the condition in which
God has placed them," and then, on the approach of starvation,
dole out to them in charity a minute proportion of the products
of their own labor. He does not believe such relations to be of
God's appointment, and therefore permanent. " When I speak,
either in this place or elsewhere, of " the labouring classes," or
of labourers as a " class," I use those phrases in compliance with
eastern, and as descriptive of an existing, but by no means a ne-
cessary or permanent, state of social relations. I do not recog-
nize as either just or salutary, a state of society in which there is
any ** class" which is not laboring ; any human beings exempt
from bearing their share of the necessary labors of human life,
except those unable to labor, or who have fairly earned rest by
previous toil. So long, however, as the great social evil exists
'<of a no n -laboring class, laborers also constitute a class, and
APPENDIX. 1GI
may be spoken of, though only provisionally, in that character."
The time has gone by when the "rich should be in loco parentfs
to the poor, guiding and restraining them like children." AEH!
when they are thankfully to receive such wages, such proportion
of the products of their own labor, as their employers please t
offer them. " The working classes have taken their interests into
their own hands, and are perpetually showing that they think tbe
interests of their employers not identical with their own, but op-
posite to them." This is welcome language from an Englishman,
and member of the British Parliament.
His great hope, in regard to "the future of the labouring
classes," is in their proper education, and in the combination 1"
labour and capital not the union of mere labour with mere ca-
p'tal, when, even where labour, besides wages, receives a certain
percentage, just to make it more faithful and efficient, capital
gets the lion's .share; but the association of individuals each of
whom furnishes both capital and labour, so that in all industrial
employments cvipital shall no longer own labcur, either legally or
actually, but labour .shall own capital. I find that in Europe-
much in-ill - !, \> already boon done in that direction than I had
opposed.
He is decidedly in favor of free trade commercially, us all
Englishmen are bound to be, .mi to all unnecessary in-
termeddling of government with individual freedom in business
matters. Yet he would limit laissez fairc in many important
respects. Government should not only provide the means of edu-
cation for all the people, but " require i'mm all the people that
they shall possess instruction in certain things," if not at the
public expense then at their own. Government should interfere*
with the free control of parents over their children to prevent
their being abused, murdered, (burial clubs?) over-worked, or-
uneducated.
He would make the practical maxim of leaving contracts free
subject to many limitations, and after contracts are made govern-
ment should decide whether they are fit to be enforced.
In regard to roads, canals, railways, gas, and water works,
which are, for the most part, practically, chartered monopolies,
he thinks they should either be under direct government man-
agement, or that government should "subject the business to
reasonable conditions for the general advantage, or retain such
power over it, that the profits of the monopoly may at least be ob-
tained for the public."
This, like his advice in regard to inheritances, is better than
nothing, though a very imperfect remedy, inasmuch as, by this
method, the extortionous gains reach only in very small propor-
162 APPENDIX .
tion the muscles which produced them. The aim should be to
prevent accumulations which the public good requires to be con-
fiscated. Great wealth is the correlative of poverty, and the ele-
ment of injustice which has somewhere entered into it cannot be
eliminated by any after methods of restoration to the rightful
owners.
It is alto to be considered whether the law may not sometimes
interfere to give validity to concert among individuals in regard
to matters affecting their common interest, as where laborers
agree that a certain number of hours shall be reckoned a day's
work.
lie would relax his antiprotectionist doctrines in favor of " the
interests of national defence." But what article is there, almost,
the home production of which may not at some time, at any
time, lie necessary for the national defence, and whose production
might not for a time need protection, or if very important for na-
tional defence, ought it not to have, if necessary, permanent pro-
tection?
He admits too that, " on mere principles of political economy,
protecting duties may be defensible where they are imposed
temporarily (especially in a young and rising nation) in hopes of
naturalizing a foreign industry, in itself perfectly suitable to the
circumstances of the country."
There is applicable here a remark which he makes in another
connection. "Much has been said of the good economy of im-
porting commodities from the place where they can be bought
cheapest ; while the good economy of producing them where they
can be produced cheapest, is comparatively little thought of."
When a commodity can be, after temporary protection, pro-
duced as cheap at home as abroad, it is cheaper produced at home
by the cost of freight from abroad. When by the naturalization
of all such foreign industries the natural resources of the State
have been developed, and all those important to national defence
have been established, for how many industries would protection
be needed or asked for ? Certainly nobody would ask protection
for the production of rice in Massachusetts, or of cotton in Eng-
land, or, in general, for that of any commodity which, through
defect of soil, climate, or any other permanent condition must
cost more at home than from abroad. In all such cases com-
merce, plainly, should be the complement of other industries, un-
leas the home-production of the article is indispensable to national
defence. But if iron, when the manufacture should be established,
could be produced as cheap in Pennsylvania as in Sweden, or in
England, should the cost of freight be added to the price, and the
profits of the manufacturers abroad, of the carriers and import-
APPENDIX. I0o
ers, be protected by refusing protection ? How often is free trade
free to monopolize the market, and, by conspiracies of old and
rich establishments, to break down and prevent any foreign ris-
ing competition, and so to dictate its own extortionous prices, and
transform free trade into free stealing! Or the home " commer-
cial interest" might prove itself a self-interest by preventing for
its own profit a home manufacture required by the common in-
terest.
There can be no objection, however, to Mr. Mill's free trade,
eince he allows protection to all industries which can be success-
fully naturalized, and to all which are necessary to national de-
fence.
Free trade, however, unlimited foreign commerce, Ins rela-
tions and bearings, moral, social, and political, much higher
than those of mere Political Economy.
In regard to Mr. Mill's eulogy of foreign commerce as the
great civilizer of barbarians, as the source of important inf-
tual and moral good influence among civilized nations, as first
teaching " nations to see with good willthc wealth and prosperi-
ty of one another," &c. it is perhaps indicathe of ill temper
not to be pleased with M> fair a picture, but, houever disp.-sed to
admire it, it is difficult to avoid that it .shouM >ujxa>t the recol-
lection o( some facts in the history of oommerc i'oth
those of ancient and of modern times. Let us forget that com-
merce originated in piracy that was a long time ago. But how
did the early commercial States of the Mediterranean, Tyre,
Athens, Carthage, civilize the barbarians upon its borders? By
conquest, oppressive tribute, "slavery and the whip." Which
are also reckoned good method* for barbarians by some modern
commercial people.
The Venetians also, in the middle ages, illustrated the comity
of the commercial character, especially by exporting from Europe
children, mule as well as female, both for the harems of their
Eastern friends the Mihornedans.
In modern times, the treatment of the natives of South Ameri-
ca and of the West Indies by Spain is an example of the commer-
cial civilization of barbarians. The treatment of Africa by all the
commercial people of Europe, especially by England, who nego-
tiated a monopoly of the slave-trade, is another good example.
Indeed, it is claimed, and that too by Bishops, that the commer-
cial method of civilization, by exportation and sale, is, for Afri-
cans, superior even to that of Christianity.
For the " good will" of " merchant princes" towards nations
incapable of self-defence, see the history of the East India Com-
pany, and particularly the survey of certain provinces by Bucha-
164 A I' P K S DI X .
nan, published by Martin also the *' opium war," the compul-
sory production of opium in India to be thrust upon the Chinese,
for their civilization, at the point of the bayonet- also the com-
mercial method of " opening the ports'* of China, Japan, Siam,
&c. The history of the Dutch in Java and the Phillipines also il-
lustrates the "good will" of the commercial character.
It would, perhaps, not be fair to mention the wars of modern
Europe originating in commercial jealousy. Mr. Mill might say
they were owing to false and obsolete doctrines of Political Eco-
nomy. Would this excuse in seme degree their cruelty and sel-
fishness ?
What, then, shall we say to a recent case not arising under
obsolete doctrines a remarkable practical commentary upon the
fact that, * commerce teaches nations to see with gocd will the
wealth and prosperity of one another" a case where the insur-
gents of a friendly people were, vpon a mere declaration of their
hostile intentions, given, to their great advantage, the rights of
belligerents ; and the whole mercantile Interest of a certain State
engaged eagerly in almost open piracy and plunder of the com-
merce of a rival nation, and, in the most exulting and insulting-
language, expressed its joy at the probable ruin of " the wealth
and prosperity" of a kindred State !
These facts are, I think, a sufficient defence of what I have said
of the natural character, and tendency to excess, of commerce ;
to which if there is added the consideration of the immense masses
of mere operatives of the lowest grade which it employs, and the
character for sharp dealing of almost all grades of shopkeepers in
large commercial cities, it must be acknowledged that the "moral
influence" of commerce is yrcat, but that it is yood is not at all
obvious.
The great importance, and often the necessity of foreign com-
merce, especially for small States having little variety of climate,
and of agricultural and mining products, is not to be denied. The
co mvarative cost of production, in two distant countries, both of
which are capable of producing two given commodities may also
render an interchange of present mutual advantage notwithstand-
ing the labor expended in the double freight.
It may, for example, be for the present mutual advantage of
the parties that Illinois should send wheat to England, and re-
ceive English cloths in return But, surely, unless it is desirable
to increase the sum total of human labor, on the principle of fur-
nishing employment for the working classes, there, is here an im-
mense waste of labor, and however it might be for the English
manufacturers I cannot help thinking that it would be for the in-
terest of the Illinois farmers if the consumers of their wheat were
at Chicago instead of Manchester.
APPENDIX . 165
It cannot be made to appear from such instances of temporary
or permanent mutual benefit by interchange of commodities that
the common interest of each nation will be best secured by leav-
ing each particular Interest to seek unrestrained its own self-
interest ; nor that the common good of all commercial nations is
best promoted where each great Interest and each nation seeks
wholly its own uncontrolled except by the " good will" that Mr.
Mill speaks of. But such is unlimited free trade, more appro-
priately named free fight, in which, as in all other free fights, tho
weaker goes to the wall.
The conclusions of Political Economy, so far as it has any
claim to the character of a science, imply that the human agent*
who execute its laws are as impassive and passionless as the
wheels of a spinning jenny, while, in fact, the practical results of
the play of the real forces are, for the most part, such as chance
advantage among equals, or unprincipled power in relation to
weakness, or unfeeling wealth in relation to poverty, or selfish in-
tellect in relation to ignorance may choose to determine.
Mr. Mill seems to have transferred his own amiable character
to his ideal of foreign commerce, and to look upon all nations as
members of one great family, each by free commercial intercoureg
promoting and rejoicing in its own prosperity and that of all tho
others, although he is far enough from attributing such " good
will" to individuals and interests in the same nation, and is se-
vere on the relations of the higher classes to the lower, the rich
to the poor, and the antagonism of capital and labor. He seemi
not to have conceived of a single State as a complete organic
whole performing all its own functions and maintaining all iUl
natural organs in their due measure and just relations to each
other, or, if any legitimate organ is deficient, making foreign
commerce only the complement of its own fully developed re-
sources. But this surely is the only true and safe policy for eve-
ry State, in proportion to its natural ability to realize it, until
the good will of nations towards each other shall actually become
such as Mr. Mill speaks of.
Considering Mr. Mill's opinions in regard to the just distribu-
tion of wealth, and the probability of its not distant accomplish-
ment, I am surprised to find that he agrees violently with Mal-
thus and Chalmers in regard to the necessity of the "moral,
preventive check" upon population as the indispensable remedy
for low wages and that he believes it can be made an efficient
remedy. First, in regard to the efficiency oi this remedy what
is the probability of the "laboring classes" being elevated to tho
requisite grade of intelligence and prudence, until the remedy for
low wages is otherwise first found, and continued long enough to
166 APPENDIX.
confirm the laborer in habits of comfort, and to give him a res-
pectability and self-respect, to preserve which, he will be ready
to control the strongest instincts and affections of his nature.
Will laborers as a class be, thus, or in any other way, at all times
ready to forego a present indulgence through prudent foresight of
a possible but uncertain inconvenience twenty years hence ? Or,
is it likely that public opinion and private conscience will ever be
brought to demand so imperatively as to control "the strength of
the principle of population" to the degree that it shall be ac-
counted a vice and a crime for a married pair traders lampada
vita to more than a single pair of offspring to take their own
places ? If this were possible at what a cost of much more immo-
ral and dangerous practices would it be attained.
Second, in regard to the necessity of this remedy. To us, in
this country , where we both produce and import population ad
libitum, we cannot appreciate the necessity. The Malthusian me-
thod strikes an American as ridiculously inefficient and abortive.
Doubtless it would be a convenient method of diminishing the
competition for labor, if the laborers should choose to adopt it,
morally much less objectionable than that by " burial clubs."
Cut that any government not a mere faineant should admit its
necessity, or that there can exist any necessity requiring such a
remedy within any definite number of millenniums is quite incre-
dible. "Why, the land of the planet can feed thirty thousand
millions of men, and the waters probably ^alf as many more, and
it has at present little more than one thousand millions.
Undoubtedly, as Mr. Mill says, " there is not much satisfaction
in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous
activity of nature ; every flowery waste or natural pasture
ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated
for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow
or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a
wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a
weed in the name of improved agriculture. ' '
Who would not wish that all such wild ruralities may not be-
colne extinct in his time? But, at the rate of increase of popu-
lation for the last five or six thousand years, it will require not
far from two hundred thousand years, before the Earth will ar-
rive at the unhappy condition of surface deprecated by Mr Mill.
Surely we may, without selfishness, neglect to look out for the es-
thetic enjoyment of our posterity beyond that period.
If then, we can attain to a just distribution of the products of
labor, and of labor itself, an abatement of the drones of society,
when the law of Christianity shall be executed " if any man will
network neither shall he eat" when men shall no longer be di-
APPENDIX. 107
vided into great but unequal castes, one to perform exclusively
the function of the brain, another that of the muscles, and a
third fruyes consumer e nati, but the existence of a voluntary
organ shall carry with it the right and the duty ol its legitimate
exercise ; when governments shall adopt the natural and obvious
remedy for over-population, always instinctively known and
practiced by animals, COLONIZATION, as exemplified by Mr. Mill
himself; when men shall thus follow Mr. Mill's own excellent
teaching, and obey God's second great command to "subdue the
Earth," may they not, then, also obey the first, " be fruitful,"
and pass " the torch of life," not with niggard and selfish pre-
caution and fear of being encroached upon, but freely and merri-
ly, so it be normally, from hand to hand.
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