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HIGHER SENTIMENTS OF ADVANCING CIVILIZATION. 273

is due; and by the help of which it triumphs? Mani festly this feeling that responds to the law of equal freedom. These pertinacious demands for political equality are simply the signs of its increasing activity. Not hunger, nor the anxiety to escape from torture, nor the desire for vengeance, is now the transforming force, but a calm unswerving determination to get human liberties recog nized. The carrying out one of these battles of opinion to a successful issue through long delays and discouragements, through ridicule and misrepresentation, implies a perennial source of energy quite different from mere insurrectionary rage. In place of a passing gust of anger, a persistent and ever-strengthening sentiment is here the acting agent. Agitation is its gymnasium. Men in whom it predominates cultivate it in the rest. They address it in speeches; they write articles to it; they convene meetings for its manifestation. It is aroused by denunciations of injustice; it is appealed to in the name of conscience; it is conjured by all that is fair and upright and equitable. Pictures of the slave and the tyrant are exhibited to excite its abhorrence; a state of pure freedom is described to it as the one to be loved and hoped for; and it is made sensible of the sacredness of human rights. After men's minds have been for many years thus exercised and stimulated, a sufficiently intense manifestation of feeling is produced, and then comes the reform. But this feeling, mark, proceeds from that same combination of faculties by which, as we have seen, free institutions are upheld and made practicable. One of these agitations, therefore, is a kind of apprenticeship to the liberties obtained by it. The power to get freedom becomes the measure of the power to use it. The law of social forms is that they shall be expressive of national character; they come into exist ence bearing its impress; and they live only so long as it supplies them with vitality. Now a general dissatisfac

tion with old arrangements is a sign that the national character requires better ones; and for the people in pursuit of these better ones to have organized associations, maintained lecturers, and for session after session to have wearied the legislature with petitions-to have continued this, too, until the accumulated force of opinion has become irresistible, is to have given conclusive proof that the change brought about is really in harmony with the wants of the age. The new institutions do not now express an exceptional state of the popular mind, but express its habitual state, and hence are certain to be fitted to it.

ers.

12. Here then is encouragement for timid reformMen of true insight need none of these detailed considerations to steady their convictions by. The mathematician does not call for a pair of compasses to test a proved theorem with; nor does the man with healthy faith wait for more evidence after he hears what the moral law says. It is enough for him that a thing is right. He will never believe that the carrying out of what is right by right means, can be injurious. And this is the only spirit worthy to be named religious. But as, unhappily, the many are not endowed with so trusting a belief, it is requisite to back the dictates of equity with supplementary arguments. The moral infidelity of the expediency school requires meeting. And it is to those infected by it that the above considerations are commended, as showing that they need not fear to exhibit whatever sympathy with democratic principles they possess-need not fear to throw their energies at once into the popular cause, for that when equitable institutions are equitably obtained, they must necessarily prosper.

13. Thus the claim deducible from the law of

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT.

275

equal freedom-the claim possessed by each citizen to like political power with the rest-is not counterbalanced by any of those prudential considerations commonly urged against it. We find that so long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented. The assertion that conceding universal suffrage would be creating a comparatively immoral constituency, proves to be quite unwarrantable; seeing that all classes are immoral, and, when numbers and circumstances are taken into account, apparently in an equal degree. A glance at the evidence shows that popular ignorance also is a twoedged objection; for, in the knowledge which may be supposed needful for the right use of votes, the mass of those inside the pale of the constitution are about as deficient as those outside of it. The argument that purely representative institutions have been tried and have failed, is not only based upon inapplicable instances, but would prove nothing if substantiated. Lastly, in this, as in other cases, it turns out that the possibility of fulfilling the injunctions of the moral law is proportionate to the advance men have made toward the moral state; political arrangements inevitably adjusting themselves to the popular character. So that whilst we may say to the ardent democrats "Be sure that a democracy will be attained whenever the people are good enough for one"-we may on the other hand say to those of little faith-"Fear not that a democracy, when peacefully attained, can be attained too soon."

CHAPTER XXI.

THE DUTY OF THE STATE.

1. As already said (pp. 230 and 231), morality stands toward government only in the nature of a limitation-behaves negatively with regard to it, not positively-replies to all inquiries by silently indicating the conditions of existence, constitution, and conduct, under which alone it may be ethically tolerated. And thus, ignoring government altogether, the moral law can give us no direct information as to what a government ought to do-can merely say what it ought not to do. That we are left with no precise knowledge beyond this, may indeed be inferred from a preceding chapter. For if, as was shown, every man has a right to secede from the state, and if, as a consequence, the state must be regarded as a body of men voluntarily associated, there remains nothing to distinguish it in the abstract from any other incorporated society-nothing to determine its specific function; and we may conceive its members assigning to it any function that does not involve a breach of the moral law.

Immediate guidance in this matter being thus impossible, we must follow such indirect ways of arriving at the truth as are open to us. The question is no longer one of pure ethics, and is therefore incapable of solution by any exact methods: approximative ones only are available. Fortunately there are several of these; and converging as they do to the same conclusion, that conclusion assumes something like the character of certainty. Let us now successively employ them.

2. Good, and perfect, and complete, are words applicable to whatever is thoroughly fitted to its purpose

man.

WHAT IS IT TO BE MORAL?

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and by the word moral we signify the same property in a A thing which entirely answers its end cannot be improved; and a man whose nature leads him to a spontaneous fulfilment of the Divine will cannot be conceived better. To be quite self-sufficing-to have powers exactly commensurate with what ought to be done, is to be or ganically moral. Given the ordained object-happiness; given the conditions under which this happiness is to be compassed; and perfection consists in the possession of faculties exactly adapted to these conditions: whilst the moral law is simply a statement of that line of conduct by which the conditions are satisfied. Hence to the rightlyconstituted man all external help is needless-detrimental even. Just as the healthy body wants no crutch, tonic, or stimulus, but has within itself the means of doing every thing required of it, so the normally-developed character asks no artificial aids; and indeed repudiates them as preoccupying the sphere for the exercise of faculties which the hypothesis supposes it to have. When, on the other hand, man's constitution and the conditions of his existence are not in harmony, there arise external agencies to supply the place of deficient internal faculties. And these temporary substitutes being supplementary to the faculties, and assisting the imperfect man as they do to fulfil the law of his being-the moral law, as we call it— obtain a certain reflex authority from that law, varying with the degree in which they subserve its requirements. Whatever may be its special function, it is clear that government is one of these artificial aids; and the most important of them.

Or the case may perhaps be more clearly stated thus: -If government has any duty at all, that duty must be to perform a service of some kind-to confer a benefit. But every possible benefit or service which can be rendered to a man is comprehended under the general expres

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