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of modern states, contemporaneous progress of wealth or culture and civil liberty, and the national state as contradistinguished to the ancient city-state, the only state of antiquity in which liberty appeared. These are not merely facts which happen to present themselves to the historian, but they are conditions upon which it is the modern problem to develop liberty, because they are requisites for modern civilization, and civilization is the comprehensive aim of all humanity.

We must have national states (and not citystates); we must have national broadcast liberty (and not narrow chartered liberty); we must have increasing wealth, for civilization is expensive; we must have liberty, and our states must last long, to perform their great duties. All this can be obtained by institutional liberty alone. It is neither maintained that longevity alone is the object, nor that it can be obtained by institutions alone. Russia, peculiarly uninstitutional, because it unites Asiatic despotism with European bureaucracy, has lasted long, even though we may consider its late celebration of its millennial existence as a great official license. But what is maintained here is, that longevity, together with progressive liberty, is obtainable only by institutional liberty. England, now really a thousand years old, presents the great spectacle of an old nation advancing steadily in wealth and liberty. She is far richer than she was a century ago, and her government is of a far more popular cast. In ancient times, it was adopted as an axiom that liberty and wealth are incompatible. Modern writers, down to a very

recent period, have followed the ancients. Declaimers frequently do so to this day; but they show that they do not comprehend modern liberty and civilization. Modern in-door civilization, with all her schools and charities and comforts of the masses, is incalculably dearer than ancient out-door civilization. Modern civilization is very dear. Yet our liberty requires civilization as a basis and a prop; our progressive liberty requires progressive civilization, consequently progressive wealth-not, indeed, enormous riches in the hands of a few. Antiquity knew, and Asia possesses to this day such riches in greater number than modern Europe has ever known them.1 We stand in need of immeasurable wealth, but it is dif fused, widely spread and widely enjoyed wealth, for we stand in need of widely spread and widely enjoyed culture.

To last, to last with liberty and wealth, is the great problem for a state. Our destinies differ from that of brief and brilliant Greece. Let us derive all the benefit from Grecian culture and civilization-from that chosen nation, whose intellectuality and æsthetics, with christian morality, Roman legality and Teutonic individuality and independence, form the main elements of the great phenomenon we designate by the term modern civilization, without adopting her evils and errors, even as we adopt her sculpture without that religion whose very errors contributed to produce it.

* Indeed, the enormous treasures occasionally met with in Asia are indications of her comparative poverty.

CHAPTER XXXI.

INSECURITY OF UNINSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENTS. UNORGANIZED, INARTICULATED POPULAR POWER.

THE insecurity of concentrated governments has been mentioned in a previous part of this work. The same may be said of all governments that are not of a strongly institutional character. Eastern despotism is constantly exposed to the danger of seraglio conspiracies, as the centralized governments of the European continent showed their insecurity in the year 1848. They rocked and many broke to pieces, although there was, with very few exceptions, no ardent struggle, and nothing that approached to a civil war. To an observer at a distance, it almost appeared as if those governments could be shaken by the loud huzzaing of a crowd. They have, indeed, recovered; but this may be for a time only; nor will it be denied that the lesson, even as it stands, is a pregnant one.

During all that time of angry turmoil, England and the United States stood firm. The government of the latter country was exposed to rude shocks indeed, at the same period; but her institutional character protected her. England has had

her revolution; every monarchy probably must pass through such a period of violent change ere civil liberty can be largely established and consciously enjoyed by the people-ere government and people fairly understand one another on the common ground. of liberty and self-government. But no fact seems to be so striking in the revolution of the seventeenth century in England as this, that all her institutions of an organic character, her jury, her common law, her representative legislature, her local self-government, her justice of the peace, her sheriff, her coroner—all survived the sanguinary struggle, and then served as the basis of an enlarged liberty. The reason of this broad fact cannot be that the English revolution did not occur in a time of bold philosophical speculation as the French revolution did. The English religionists of the seventeenth century were as bold speculative reasoners as the French philosophers were, and England's religious fanatics were quite as fierce enemies of property and society as the French political fanatics were. It was, in my opinion, pre-eminently her institutional character in general, or the whole system of institutions and the degree of self-government contained in each, that saved each single institution, and enabled her to weather the storm when she was exposed to the additional great danger of a worthless general government after the restoration. There is a tenacity of life and reproductive principle of vitality exhibited in the whole seventeenth century of British history, that cannot be too attentively examined by the candid statesmen of our family of

nations.

1

It may be objected to my remarks that Russia, too, has remained untouched by the attempted revolutions of the year 1848, although her government is a very centralized one. Russia has in some respects much of an Asiatic character, and the succession of her monarchs is marked by an almost equal number of palace conspiracies and imperial murders or imprisonments. The people, on the other hand, have not yet been reached by the political movements of our race. There is in politics, as in all spheres of humanity, such a thing as being below and being above an evil. Many persons that are free from skepticism are not above it, but the fearful questions have never yet presented themselves; and many nations remain quiet, while others are torn by civil wars, not because they are above, but because they are still below revolutions.

Russia may be said, in one respect at least, to furnish us with the extreme opposite to self-government. "The service," that is, public service, or being a servant of the imperial government, has been raised in that country to a real cult, a sort of official religion. Any infraction of justice, any hardship, any complaint will be replied to with a shrug of the shoulder and the words "the service." The term service in its present Russian adaptation is the symbol for the most absolute government, the most passive bureaucracy, and a most automaton-like government played by

A London journal said some years ago, with great bitterness, yet with truth: A Russian czar is a highly assassinative substance.

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