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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 something,
if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms,
and so has that property to dispose of.
The same necessity which secures the rights of
person and property against the malignity or folly
of the magistrate, determines the form and methods
of governing, which are proper to each nation and
to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to
other states of society. In this country we are very
vain of our political institutions, which are singular
in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living
men, from the character and condition of the people,
which they still express with sufficient fidelity,--
and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in
history. They are not better, but only fitter for us.
We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern
times of the democratic form, but to other states of
society, in which religion consecrated the monarchical,
that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better
for us, because the religious sentiment of the present
time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are
nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our
fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also
relatively right. But our institutions, though in
coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any
exemption from the practical defects which have
discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt.
Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire
on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed
in the word politic, which now for ages has signified
cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
The same benign necessity and the same practical
abuse appear in the parties, into which each State
divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the
administration of the government. Parties are also
founded on instincts, and have better guides to
their own humble aims than the sagacity of their
leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin,
but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We
might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost,
as a political party, whose members, for the most
part, could give no account of their position, but
stand for the defence of those interests in which
they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins
when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding
of some leader, and obeying personal considerations,
throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of
points nowise belonging to their system. A party is
perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we
absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot
extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap
the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses
which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties
of circumstance, and not of principle; as the planting
interest in conflict with the commercial; the party of
capitalists and that of operatives; parties which are
identical in their moral character, and which can
easily change ground with each other in the support of
many of their measures. Parties of principle, as,
religious sects, or the party of free-trade, of universal
suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of
capital punishment,--degenerate into personalities, or
would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading
parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair
specimen of these societies of opinion) is that they do
not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds
to which they are respectively entitled, but lash
themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and
momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.
Of the two great parties which at this hour almost
share the nation between them, I should say that one
has the best cause, and the other contains the best men.
The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will of
course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for
free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of
legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating
in every manner the access of the young and the poor to
the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept
the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to
him as representatives of these liberalities. They have
not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy
what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving;
it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive
only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side,
the conservative party, composed of the most moderate,
able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid,
and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right,
it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it
proposes no generous policy; it does not build, nor write,
nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish
schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave,
nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.
From neither party, when in power, has the world any
benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all
commensurate with the resources of the nation.
I do not for these defects despair of our republic.
We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In
the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always
finds itself cherished; as the children of the
convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy
a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of
feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institutions
lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious
among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look
with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said
that in our license of construing the Constitution,
and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no
anchor; and one foreign observer thinks he has found
the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us;
and another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism.
Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely,
when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that
a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will
sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst
a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then
your feet are always in water. No forms can have any
dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the
laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons
weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as
the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment
the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us,
as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two
poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is
universal, and each force by its own activity develops
the other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want
of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies
conscience. 'Lynch-law' prevails only where there is
greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders.
A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest
requires that it should not exist, and only justice
satisfies all.
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity
which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses
itself in them as characteristically as in statues,
or songs, or railroads; and an abstract of the codes
of nations would be a transcript of the common
conscience. Governments have their origin in the
moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be
reason for another, and for every other. There is a
middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they
never so many or so resolute for their own. Every
man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds
in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and
Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a
perfect agreement, and only in these; not in what is
good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what
amount of land or of public aid, each is entitled to
claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor
to make application of to the measuring of land, the
apportionment of service, the protection of life and
property. Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very
awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor; or,
every government is an impure theocracy. The idea
after which each community is aiming to make and mend
its law, is the will of the wise man. The wise man it
cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest
efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by
causing the entire people to give their voices on every
measure; or by a double choice to get the representation
of the whole; or, by a selection of the best citizens;
or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal
peace by confiding the government to one, who may himself
select his agents. All forms of government symbolize an
immortal government, common to all dynasties and
independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist,
perfect where there is only one man.
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement
to him of the character of his fellows. My right
and my wrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst
I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is
unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our
means, and work together for a time to one end. But
whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient
for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I
overstep the truth, and come into false relations to
him. I may have so much more skill or strength than
he that he cannot express adequately his sense of
wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him
and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption;
it must be executed by a practical lie, namely by force.
This undertaking for another is the blunder which stands
in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world.
It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not
quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a great
difference between my setting myself down to a self-
control, and my going to make somebody else act after
my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume
to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed
by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity
of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague
and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but
those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If
I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in
one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that
perception is law for him and me. We are both there,
both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought,
I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with
him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This
is the history of governments,--one man does something
which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted
with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me ordains that
a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical
end,--not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the
consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay
the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere
they think they get their money's worth, except for these.
Hence the less government we have the better,--
the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The
antidote to this abuse of formal Government is
the influence of private character, the growth of
the Individual; the appearance of the principal to
supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise
man; of whom the existing government is, it must
be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all
things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation,
intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver,
is character; that is the end of Nature, to reach
unto this coronation of her king. To educate the
wise man the State exists, and with the appearance
of the wise man the State expires. The appearance
of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise
man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,
--he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or
palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground,
no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for
he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a
prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver;
no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at
home where he is; no experience, for the life of the
creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes.
He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell
to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him
needs not husband and educate a few to share with
him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is
angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence,
frankincense and flowers.
We think our civilization near its meridian, but
we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning
star. In our barbarous society the influence of
character is in its infancy. As a political power,
as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers
from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet
suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the
Annual Register is silent; in the Conversations'
Lexicon it is not set down; the President's Message,
the Queen's Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet
it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and
piety throw into the world, alters the world. The
gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all
their frocks of force and simulation, the presence
of worth. I think the very strife of trade and
ambition are confession of this divinity; and
successes in those fields are the poor amends, the
fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide
its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in
all quarters. It is because we know how much is due
from us that we are impatient to show some petty
talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by
a conscience of this right to grandeur of character,
and are false to it. But each of us has some talent,
can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable,
or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology
to others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark
of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us,
whilst we thrust it on the notice of our companions.
It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth
our own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the
strong when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go.
Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are
constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with
a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not
as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our
permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in
society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to
say, 'I am not all here.' Senators and presidents
have climbed so high with pain enough, not because
they think the place specially agreeable, but as an
apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood
in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation
to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
They must do what they can. Like one class of forest
animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb
they must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-
natured that he could enter into strict relations with
the best persons and make life serene around him by the
dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford
to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and
covet relations so hollow and pompous as those of a
politician? Surely nobody would be a charlatan who could
afford to be sincere.
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of
self-government, and leave the individual, for all
code, to the rewards and penalties of his own
constitution; which work with more energy than we
believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints.
The movement in this direction has been very marked
in modern history. Much has been blind and
discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is
not affected by the vices of the revolters; for this
is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any
party in history, neither can be. It separates the
individual from all party, and unites him at the
same time to the race. It promises a recognition of
higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the
security of property. A man has a right to be employed,
to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power
of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into
confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled
to bear his part in certain social conventions; nor
doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and
the fruit of labor secured, when the government of
force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent
that all competition is hopeless? could not a nation
of friends even devise better ways? On the other hand,
let not the most conservative and timid fear anything
from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the
system of force. For, according to the order of nature,
which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus;
there will always be a government of force where men
are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure
the code of force they will be wise enough to see how
these public ends of the post-office, of the highway,
of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums
and libraries, of institutions of art and science can
be answered.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay
unwilling tribute to governments founded on force.
There is not, among the most religious and instructed
men of the most religious and civil nations, a
reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient
belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that
society can be maintained without artificial restraints,
as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen
might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the
hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too,
there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power
of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of
renovating the State on the principle of right and love.
All those who have pretended this design have been
partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the
supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind a
single human being who has steadily denied the authority
of the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral
nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as
they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-
pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to
think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen;
and men of talent and women of superior sentiments cannot
hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to
fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm,
and there are now men,--if indeed I can speak in the plural
number,--more exactly, I will say, I have just been
conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse
experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that
thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other
the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of
friends, or a pair of lovers. _
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