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society cannot hold together. This is plain to every one. Yet there exists this great distinction, that there may be obedience, demanded on the sole ground of authority; such is the obedience expected by the parent. The authority of the parent comes from a source not within the circle of the obeyers. And there may be obedience, which has its very source within the circle of the obeyers. Such is the source of obedience due to authority in that society the component members of which live in jural relations -in one word, in the state. The freeman obeys, not because the government exists before the people and makes them, but because man is a being destined to live in a political state, because he must have laws and a government. It is his privilege, and one of the distinctions from the brute creation. Yet, the government existing as a consequence of the jural nature of society and of man, it is unworthy of a freeman to obey any individual as individual, to follow his commands merely because issued by him, while the citizen of a free country acknowledges it as a prerogative to obey laws. A

The obedience of a loyal free citizen is an act of self-directing compliance with a rule of action; and it becomes a triumph of reason and freedom when self-directing obedience is thus paid to laws which the obeyer considers erroneous, yet knows to be the laws of the land, rules of action legitimately prescribed by a body of which he forms a constituent part. This noble attribute of man is never politically developed except by institutions. To obey institutions of self-government has nothing galling

in it on the ground of submission. We do not obey a person whom as individual we know to be no more than ourselves, but we obey the institution of which we know ourselves to be as integral a part as the superior, clothed with authority. The religious duty of obeying for conscience sake is not excluded from this obedience. On the contrary, it forms an important element. The term "law-abiding people" could never have become so favorite an expression with us, and be inscribed even on the banners of some who defy the law, were we not an institutional people under the authority of institutional self-government.

Rulers over twenty millions of people, like our presidents, could not be easily changed, without shock or convulsion, were not the twenty millions trained by institutional self-government, were not the ousted minority conscious that, in the spontaneous act of submitting, they obey an institution of which they form as important a part as the ruling party, and did not their own obedience foreshadow the obedience which the others must yield, when their turn comes. The "principle of authority" has become for the time being as popular, at least as often repeated a phrase in France, as "abiding by the law" is with us. Pamphlets are written on it, the journals descant on it. If the object of these writings is to prove that there must be authority where there is society, it would prove that the writers must consider the opinion of some communists, that all government is to be done away with, far more serious and disseminated than people at a distance can believe, to whom such absurdity appears as a mere paper and opposi

tion fanaticism. If, however, all those discourses are intended to establish the principle of authority in politics as an independent principle, such for instance as it is maintained in the catholic church, because its institutor is far above it, and has given divine commandments, it would only show that the ruling party plainly desire absolutism.3

3 There is no doubt in my mind that the institutional government is the real school of civil obedience. Whether the following remarkable passage, which I found in baron Müffling's Memoirs of the Campaign of 1813 and 1814, edited by Col. Philip Yorke, London, 1853, must be in part explained by the general self-government of England, and the fact that every English gentleman is accustomed to political self-government and consequently to obedience, I shall not decide, but I strongly incline to believe that we must do so. General Müffling was the Prussian officer in the staff of the duke of Wellington, who served as an official link between the two armies. He was, therefore, in constant personal intercourse with the English commander, and had the very best opportunity of observing that which he reports.

"I observed," says general Müffling, "that the duke exercised far greater power in the army he commanded than prince Blücher in the one committed to his care. The rules of the English service permitted the duke's suspending any officer and sending him back to England. The duke had used this power during the war in Spain, when disobedience showed itself among the higher officers. Sir Robert Wilson was an instance of this.

"Amongst all the generals, from the leaders of corps to the commanders of brigades, not one was to be found in the active army who had been known as refractory.

"It was not the custom in this army to criticize or control the commander-in-chief. Discipline was strictly enforced; every one knew his rights and his duties. The duke, in matters of service, was very short and decided. He allowed questions, but dismissed all such as were unnecessary. His detractors have accused him of being inclined to encroach on the functions of others-a charge which is at variance with my experience."

Institutional self-government distinguishes itself above all others for tenacity and a formative, assimilative and transmissible character.

Its tenacity is shown by the surviving of many institutions even in the most violent changes, and though their characters may be but very partially a self-governing one. In no period is this truth more strikingly illustrated than in the conquest of the Roman empire by the Northern races. The Gothic sword took lands and scaled towns, but it could not scale institutions, and Theodoric rather assimilated his Germanic. hosts to the remnants of Roman institutions than the Italians to the conquerors. It has been so wherever the conqueror met with institutions and did not in turn oppose institutions of his own, as, in a great measure, the Visigoths did in Spain. The military despotism which swept over the whole continent of Europe left England unscathed; even in spite of Cromwell's military and organized absolutism, thè institutions survived Cromwell's vigor and Charles's prostitution of England.

Mr. Macaulay says that upon the whole it was probably better that the English allowed Charles the Second to return without insisting upon distinct and written guarantees of their liberties. This may be a disputable point, for we see that the English were after all obliged to resort to them in the Declaration of Rights and Settlement; but it will hardly be disputed that the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second would have been fatal to England had she not been eminently institutional in her character.

The tenacious life of institutional liberty is shown perhaps greatest in times of political mediocrity and material well-being. Gloomy, or ardent, and bold times may try men's souls, but periods of material prosperity and public depression try a country's institutions. They are the most difficult times, and liberty is lost at least as often by stranding on pleasant shores as by wrecking on boiling breakers.

The formative character of institutional self-government is shown in such cases as the formation of the Oregon government, as has been mentioned before. So does the extensive British empire in the East show the formative and vital character of selfgovernment. No absolute government could have established or held such an empire at such a distance, and yet an absolute ruler would consider it indicative of feebleness and not of strength in a government, that a board of shareholders can recall a governor-general, and a man like sir Robert Peel, as premier, could acquiesce in it.

Even the Liberians may be mentioned here. People who, while with us, belonged to a degraded class, many of whom were actual slaves, and the rest socially unfree, nevertheless have carried with them an amount of institutionalism which had percolated even down to them; and a government has been established which enjoys internal peace, and seems to grow in strength and character every day, at the same time that hundreds of attempts in Europe have sadly miscarried. And, again, people of the same race, but having originally lived under a government without the element of institutional self-rule-the

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