Essays — Second Series
possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence
is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the
virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,
man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not
respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence
into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for
wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood;
it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us
in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess
its essence until after a long time.
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POLITICS.
Gold and iron are good
To buy iron and gold;
All earth's fleece and food
For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,
Proved Napoleon great,--
Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust,--
Walls Amphion piled
Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.
VII. POLITICS.
In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institution are
not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are
not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act
of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a
particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may
make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young
citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men
and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all
arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that
society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particle
may suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the system
to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or
Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul,
does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be
treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe
that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy
and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce,
education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure,
though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get
sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish
legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that
the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the
citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only
who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government
which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the
population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are
superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has
in the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there to
say, Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day?
Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon
becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint.
Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and
will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the
pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is opened to more
intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not
articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general
mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic.
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but
shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions
of public bodies; then shall be carried as grievance and bill of
rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and
establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place in turn to
new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse
outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy
of culture and of aspiration.
The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which
they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their
revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whose
protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in
virtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its
whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are
equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are
very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. This
accident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties,
of which there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimony, falls
unequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights,
universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the
census; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and
of owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by
an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off;
and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of
the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban
and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend
their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer
who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether
additional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban
and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection
for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob,
who, because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his
own?
In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and so
long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion would
arise in any equitable community than that property should make the law
for property, and persons the law for persons.
But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do not
create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new owner's, as
labor made it the first owner's: in the other case, of patrimony, the
law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view according
to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.
It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principle
that property should make law for property, and persons for persons;
since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction.
At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the
proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors,
on the Spartan principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not that
which is equal, just."
That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former
times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had
not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to
our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them
poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure
and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on
its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons
deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the
consideration of the State is persons; that property will always follow
persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men; and
if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement
and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.
If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is
less when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by better
guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect.
Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons.
The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen,
die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper,
as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable
majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations
beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things
have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.
Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it is planted and
manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances
are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms,
persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert
their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of
earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid,
convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound; it will always attract
and resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight:--and
the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise,
under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force,--if not
overtly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; if not
wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by might.
The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons
are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an
idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the
religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of
calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest
can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant
actions, out of all proportion to their means; as the Greeks, the
Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.
In like manner to every particle of property belongs its own attraction.
A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other
commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so
much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may
do what it will with the owner of property; its just power will still
attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shall
have power except the owners of property; they shall have no vote.
Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write
every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the
scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of
property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of
course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates.
When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint
treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns