But even with right motive upon its side, and a high and worthy end in view, a revolution should not be ventured upon merely to get rid of annoyances or grievances that reach not to the core of society, and that time might relieve or allay, but to redress accumulated and unbearable wrongs for which there seems no other remedy. This rule, likewise, is fully recognized in the Declaration: no established government should be violently changed "for light and transient causes;" but the people should rather "suffer while evils are sufferable." Abuses and usurpations protracted and undisguised, tending always to destroy the rights of the subject, and bring him hopelessly under despotic power, these justify and demand a revolution as their remedy. Yet even at this point, when there is every legal and moral justification for recourse to arms, it may be well to pause, and see if there be a fair prospect of success to warrant the fearful responsibility of attempting it. As Lord Brougham has pithily said, "The

evils must have become intolerable before the resistance is to be attempted: the parties whose rights are invaded must first exhaust every peaceful and orderly and lawful means of obtaining redress. An insurrection is only to be justified by the necessity which leaves no alternative; and the probability of success is to be weighed, in order that a hopeless attempt may not involve the community in distress and confusion." Every one of these qualifying conditions was fully met in the state of the American Colonies when they put forth their Declaration of Independence. They were not revolutionists in theory, but defenders of society, and restorers of humanity, in fundamental rights. Indeed, what is commonly conceived of as a political right of revolution, I prefer to characterize as the moral duty of resistance to tyranny and wrong, even to the extent of breaking up the whole established order of things, a duty which, when the case arises, men must be ready to perform, or, for example's sake, to perish in the attempt; and this moral distinction also is not wanting in the Declaration of Independence, which affirms, that, when it is the obvious design of a government to reduce a people under absolute despotism, "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.'

I come back, then, to the wisdom and moderation of this Declaration as one of the marvels of political history, — that men in the very act of revolution, while proclaiming their independence, were so careful to measure their rights and define their duties, and to guard the future peace and order of society against the perversion of the precedent they were compelled to set. They clothed their Revolution with the sanctity of duty by throwing around it the three conditions required to vindicate a war of society upon government: (1) The movement must be founded in justice, and have in view the deliverance of society from evil, and its re-establishment upon the sound basis of the public good; (2) The evils against which it protests must be grievous and unbearable wrongs; (3) Revolution should appear to be the only, and at the same time a feasible, mode of redress. Bad government, at the worst, may be better than anarchy; and such are the horrors of civil war, that no people should dare attempt a revolution save in the last resort against desperate wrongs, and with a reasonable hope of success in the attempt to win justice by the sword. The French Constitution of June 24, 1793, declared that "every order against a person, in cases and forms not specified by law, is arbitrary and tyrannical," a proposition the truth of which is now generally admitted, except during a state of siege; but the article added, "The person against whom such an order should be executed by force has the right to resist it by force,"1

a declaration that goes far beyond the naked right of self-defence, and would authorize every citizen, and much more any body of citizens, when aggrieved by an unjust act of government, to resist by violence in the first instance, and hence would keep alive in the body politic a latent fever of rebellion, liable to break out upon the slightest provocation. Such a "right of revolution " would arm the citizens en permanence as a police against the government, and subject the authority of the State to the caprice and anarchy of individual wills. It might overthrow a bad government, but could never establish good and stable society.

Mr. Jefferson, during his residence in Paris, seems to

1 Article 11.

have had his head turned for a moment by the political philosophy that prepared the French Revolution. Writing from Paris in 1789, he said, "The earth belongs always to the living generation: they may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters, too, of their own persons; and, consequently, may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors are extinguished, then, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of thirty-four years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right." Again he wrote from Paris, "The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States, in the course of eleven years, is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without a revolution." 2

This theory of revolution would make of government a pendulum, but without even a fixed centre of oscillation: it would build the State upon the slope of a volcano or the bank of a mountain-torrent on a deliberate calculation of an eruption or an inundation once in a generation. It ignores the fact that men of at least three several generations are always mingled together, and profit contemporaneously by each other's labors; for, though vital statistics have averaged a generation at thirty-three years, the curtain does not fall upon the stage of life three times in a century that the earth may be cleared of one generation, and another may appear. Generations do not march on and off the stage in platoons. Men are born and grow, and society and the state are things of growth; for there enter into the constitution of society and of government certain ethical principles that have a permanent life. When one generation with toil and blood has won freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, and has caused these to be incorporated with the political organism of society, no after-generation is at liberty to vacate the

1 Letter to Madison: Works, iii. 106.

2 Ibid., ii. 331.

charter of these rights. Human society is organic, and exists in continuity, having certain uniform, transmissible, and indefeasible interests, that each generation, in turn, receives as a heritage from the past in trust for the fu ture. The extravagances of Mr. Jefferson, just quoted, reflect the French philosophy of the eighteenth century concerning man, liberty, the social compact, and kindred themes of Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire: they illustrate the vicious maxim of Diderot, that "the first step towards philosophy is incredulity;" and would make the first step towards society a mutual distrust, the first step towards the state a chronic insecurity. The American doctrine of revolution, on the contrary, was clearly and consistently maintained by John Adams. "The means and measures of ours," he wrote, "may teach mankind that revolutions are no trifles; that they ought never to be undertaken rashly; nor without deliberate consideration and sober reflection; nor without a solid, immutable, eternal foundation of justice and humanity; nor without a people possessed of intelligence, fortitude, and integrity sufficient to carry them, with steadiness, patience, and perseverance, through all the vicissitudes of fortune, the fiery trials and melancholy disasters they may have to encounter." 2 All these conditions were fulfilled in the men who led the American Revolution; and, when Adams thus characterized it, he had before him its results of more than forty years. It is due to Jefferson to say that he emerged from the visionary philosophy of the French revolutionary era, and returned to the sober discrimination that marks the declaration of the American Revolution; but his momentary aberration serves to point more sharply the distinction between the notions of man, liberty, society, and the state, that mark the two greatest events of the last century, the American Revolution and the French. The American Revolution based itself upon a declaration of the equal rights of men, and issued in a republic under a constitution approved by the people: the French Revolution also

3

1 I have expanded this argument in an address to the Union League Club, entitled Revolution against Free Government not a Right, but a Crime. 2 Written in 1818: Works, x. 283.

3 Letter to Lafayette, Feb. 14, 1815: Works, vol. vi. 421.

put forth a declaration of the rights of man, and resolved the nation into a republic with a constitution. But at this point the analogy ceases; and the two movements, starting from the same idea, and aiming at the same end, diverge as widely in their methods and their philosophy as in their practical results to the nations and to mankind. The American Colonies revolted against the usurpation of a government that distance and alienation had rendered almost foreign, and threw off forms that had dwindled to shadows. The French nation revolted not only against a government and its oppressions, but against the whole constitution of society upon its own soil: the monarchy, the nobility, the clergy, the body of landholders, the administration of education, of justice, of police, the civil and criminal codes, the entire fabric and material of what for ages had been the social structure of France, were tumbled into the abyss; and from that chaos of terror and blood it was sought to create a new world of order, freedom, light. But the masterful philosophy that shaped and guided the American Revolution was not there. Mirabeau possessed this; but it perished with that "head" which was his only "party." Lafayette essayed it; but France had no Washington and so the nation, stripped of king and priest, of state and church, of loyalty and reverence, of form and precedent, put its faith in a philosophy of freedom and of man, that began in the negation of that spiritual life which alone makes man worthy of freedom, or freedom a boon to

man.

It is but just to the French Revolution to say, that, if its excesses were monstrous, its provocations were also monstrous. If it filled Europe with the stench of its abominations, this was because society was already rotten to the core. One cannot fairly compare the French Revolution with the American without allowing for the difference between the two nations in geographical position, in historical and social antecedents, and also in race-training and temperament. France was not left, has never since till now been left, to work out her problems alone. She has never been free from the necessity of maintaining a great army; and, with a nation under arms, freedom is always in duress. But, after all these concessions, there