I. THE STATE.

Ὥσπερ τελεωθὲν βέλτιστον τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπος οὕτω καὶ χωρισθὲν νόμου καὶ δίκης χείριστον πάντων.—Aristotle.

History, whether founded on reliable record, or on monuments, or on the scientific analysis of the great fossil tradition called language, knows nothing of the earliest beginnings. The seed of human society, like the seed of the vegetable growth, lies under ground in darkness, and its earliest processes are invisible to the outward eye. Speculations about the descent of the primeval man from a monkey, of the primeval monkey from an ascidian, and of the primeval ascidian from a protoplastic bubble, though they may act as a potent stimulus to the biological research of the hour, certainly never can form the starting-point of a profitable philosophy of history.

As revealed in history, man is an animal, not only generically different from, but characteristically antagonistic to the brute. That which makes him a man is precisely that which no brute possesses, or can by any process of training be made to possess. The man can no more be developed out of the brute than the purple heather out of the granite rock which it clothes. The relation of the one to the other is a relation of mere outward attachment or dependency—like the relation which exists between the painter’s easel and the picture which is painted on it. The easel is essential to the picture, but it did not make the picture, nor give even the smallest hint towards the making of it. So the monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the man without being in any way participant of the divine indwelling λόγος which makes a man a man. The two are related only as all things are related, inasmuch as they are all shot forth from the great fountain-head of all vital forces, whom we justly call God.

The distinctive character of man as revealed in history is threefold. Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute activity. A man may live in a hole like a fox, but his proper humanity is shown by building a house and inventing a style of architecture. A man can sing like a bird, but—what the bird cannot do—he can make a harp or an organ. He can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but, as a man manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a hatchet of stone or iron. The other animals, however cunning, and often wonderfully adaptable in their instincts, are mere machines. Man makes machines. In this respect he is justly entitled to look upon himself as the God to the lower animals, just as the sheriff in the counties by delegated right represents the supreme authority of the Crown. But, above all things, man is a progressive animal,—not merely progressive as the grass grows from root to blade and from blade to blossom to perfect its individual type of vegetable life, but advancing from stage to stage and mounting from platform to platform for the perfectionation of the race; nor even progressive as plants and fruits are improved by culture and favourable surroundings, and what is called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and cattle is improved by selection. No doubt progress of this kind is made by man as well as by plants and brutes; but his most distinctive human progress is made, not by imposition from without, but by projection from within. These projections from within are what in philosophical language is called the idea; they proceed from the essential nature of mind, whose imperial function it is to dictate forms, as it is the servile function of the senses to receive impressions. These intelligent forms, coming directly from the divine source of all excellence, and projected from within with sovereign authority to shape for themselves an outward embodiment, constitute what in art, in literature, in religion, and in social organisms, is called the ideal; and man may accordingly be defined as an animal that lives by the conception of ideals, and whose destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if need be, to lay down his life, for the realisation of such ideals. The steps of this realisation, often slow and painful, and always difficult, are what we mean by human progress; and it is the dominant characteristic of man, of which amongst the lower animals there is not a vestige, neither indeed could be; for so long as they have no ideas, neither reason nor the outward expression of reason in language—two things so closely bound together that the wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, λόγος—so long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career according to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To do so is exclusively human. Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds, which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof that man is an animal who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the brutes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the ideal.

The form of government natural to such infant states as the expansion of the original social monad, the family, is a loose but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy—the aristocracy being always the preponderating element. In the single family, of course, we have only the monarchical element in the father, and the democratic element in the children; but, as families expand into townships, it could not be but that the heads of the families composing it, partly from their age and experience, partly from the force of individual character, should form a sort of natural aristocracy, while the less notable and less prominent members would form the δῆμος, or great body of the constantly increasing multitude of the associated families. Below these three dominant elements of the body social, there would always be found a loose company of dependents and onhangers—the class called Θῆτες in Homer (Od., iv. 644), and in the Solonian constitution—who had no civic rights any more than the serfs and vassals of our medieval feudalism. The weakness of the monarchical and the strength of the aristocratic elements in the early societies arose from the original equality of the heads of families, and from the jealousy with which they would naturally look on any functions of superiority exercised by any of their order naturally no better than themselves. The king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, would claim the homage which the title implies only for purposes of common action; and even in such cases would always be kept in check by a βουλή, or council of the aristocracy, of whose will properly he was only the executive hand; while the great mass of the people, occupied with the labours that belong to an agricultural and pastoral population, and unaccustomed to the large views which statesmanship and generalship require, would come together only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency.

The monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly rooted they may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability, seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the following:—(1) The original motive for creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of peace will cease to operate, and the instinct of individual liberty, which belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will revive, and cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with disfavour. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the ἄριστοι, or natural aristocracy, whose individual importance must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne. The natural tendency will be to follow the example of succession in private families, and recognise the right of the son to walk into the public heritage of his father; but the additional influence thus given to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective principle is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of a competition for power, will be increased; and this factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in subjection to some foreign power; or, lastly, they will dispense with the kingship altogether, and return to their original mixture of aristocracy and democracy with more firmly-defined functions and more reliable guarantees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the possession of absolute power; the sacredness of personal property and the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab of the day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, an independent, a self-reliant, and a self-governing people.

I said the Gracchi attained their object, and that by appointing a Commission for a distribution of the public lands, such as the friends of the crofters in the Highlands now propose for the repeopling of the old depopulated homes of the clan. But I said also that the disease under which Rome laboured was incurable. How was this? Simply because, whatever might have been the merits of the special Agrarian Law carried by the Gracchi, the violent steam by which the State machine was moved remained the same, the clumsy machine itself remained, and the materials with which it had to deal in a long and critical course of foreign conquest became every year larger and more unmanageable. It was not to be expected either, on the one hand, that a strong and influential aristocracy should die with a single kick, or, on the other, that a democracy, which had once learned the power of a popular flood to break down aristocratic dams, would cease to exercise that power when a convenient occasion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic and plebeian factions continued. The political struggle, as always happens in such cases, became a struggle for personal supremacy; the sanguinary street battle between the younger Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though followed by a lull for a season, was renewed after a few years in more startling form and much bloodier issues, first between Marius and Sulla, and finally between Cæsar and Pompey. Such a succession of embittered civil wars could end only in exhaustion and submission; and this is the last emphatic lesson which the history of Rome has taught to the governors of the people. Every constitution of mixed aristocratic and democratic elements which fails by kindly control on the one side, and reasonable demand on the other, to achieve that balance of those antagonising forces which means good government, must end in a military despotism. That which will not bridle itself must be bridled; and when constant irritation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation seem not too high a price to pay for peace.

Among the notable modern States three stand before us with an exceptional preference for the democratic form of government—Switzerland, France, and the great trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be regarded with curious interest and kindly human sympathy as great social experiments, by no means to be prejudged and denounced by any sweeping conclusions made from the unfortunate breakdown of the two celebrated ancient republics. The experiment in these cases, as made in altogether different circumstances and under different conditions, cannot warrant any such denunciations. The representative system which now universally prevails, and which enables a most widely-scattered and diverse-minded population to vote with a coolness and a precision and a large survey of which the urban system of Greece and Rome never dreamed; the general growth of intelligence among all classes through the action of cheap education and the large circulation of cheap books; the rapid and ever more rapid travelling of contagious thought from the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes of social unities; and, above all, let us hope the improved tone of social feeling in all the relations of man to man, which we owe to the great Christian principle of living as brother with brother, and sister with sister, under a common heavenly fatherhood,—these are all forces largely operating in the present day which justify us in hoping that many a social experiment which signally failed with the ancients may be crowned in the centuries which are now being inaugurated with encouraging success. Of the three which we have named, Switzerland is the country in which, from topographical peculiarities, the interests of jealous, neighbours, and the traditional habits of a peasant population well trained to provincial self-government, the permanence of a democratic federation may be prophesied with the greatest safety, but at the same time with the least interest to the general march of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it continued as compact and as little disturbed by external forces and internal fermentations as modern Switzerland, might have remained during the whole course of its career as sober-minded and as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which were displaced by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of France is altogether different. A republic in an over-civilised, highly-centralised, bureaucratically-governed country, with a religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, and explosive people, seems of all social experiments the least hopeful: and that is all that can wisely be said of it at present. But the social conditions in America are altogether different; and the experiment of a great democratic republic for the first time in the history of the world—for Rome in its best times, as we have seen, was an aristocracy—will be looked on by all lovers of their species with the most kindly curiosity and the most hopeful sympathy. Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. No doubt they have a difficult and slippery problem to perform. The frequent recurrence of elections to the supreme magistracy has always been, and ever must be, the breeder of faction, the nurse of venality, and the spur of ambition. Once already has this Titanic confederacy, though only a hundred years old, by going through a process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that the unifying machinery so cunningly put together by the conservative genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, was insufficient to hold in check the rebellious forces at war within its womb. No doubt also it were in vain to speak America free from those acts of gigantic jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding of the masses in various ways, which were working the ruin of Rome in the days of Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public land and defraud the people of their share in the soil than the lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods; nor, on the other hand, is there any wisdom in ascribing to the American form of government evils which, as belonging to human nature, crop up with more or less abundance under all forms of government, and which may be specially rife among ourselves. We also have our Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of all kinds, our heady speculations, our hot competitions, our over-productions, our haste to be rich, our idol worship of mere material magnificence,—these are evils, and the root of all evil, with the production of which no form of government has anything to do, and against which every form of government will be in vain invoked to contend.

In conclusion, we must bear in mind that democracy or social self-government is the most difficult of all human problems, and must be approached, not with inflated hopes and rosy imaginations, but with sobriety and caution and a sound mind, and at critical moments not without prayer and fasting. Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding our social edifice on a democratic model, we should consider seriously what a democracy really implies, and what we may reasonably promise ourselves from its possible success. Of the two rallying cries which have made it a favourite with persons given to change, equality and liberty, the one is no more true than that all the mountains in the Highlands are as high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at the best that all men have an equal right to be called men and to be treated as men, while the other is only true so far as concerns the removal of all artificial barriers to the free exercise of each man’s function, according to his capacity and opportunities. But this is a mere starting-point in the social life of a great people. When the bird is out of the cage, which it must be in order to be a perfect bird, the more serious question emerges, what use it shall make of its newly-acquired liberty. Here certainly to men, as to birds, there are great dangers to be faced; and with nations the progress of society, as already remarked, is measured to a much larger extent by the increase of limitations than by the extension of liberties. Then, again, the fundamental postulate of extreme democracy that the majority have everywhere a right to govern is manifestly false. No man as a member of society has a natural right to govern: he has a right to be governed, and well governed; and that can only be when the government is conducted by the wisest and best men who compose the society. If the numerical majority is composed of sober-minded, sensible, and intelligent persons who will either govern wisely themselves or choose persons who will do so, then democracy is justified by its deeds; but if it is otherwise, and if, when an appeal is made to the multitude, they will choose the most daring, the most ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, rather than the most sensible, the most moderate, and the most conscientious, then democracy is a bad thing, at least nothing better than the other ocracies which it supplants. It is manifest, therefore, that of all forms of government democracy is that which imperatively requires the greatest amount of intelligence and moderation among the great mass of the people, especially amongst the lower classes, who have always been the most numerous; and, as history can point to no quarter of the world where such a happy condition of the numerical intelligence has been realised, it cannot look with any favour on schemes of universal suffrage, even when qualified with a stout array of effective checks. The system, indeed, of representing every man individually, and giving every member of a society a capitation vote, as they have a capitation tax in Turkey, however popular with the advocates of extreme democracy, seems quite unreasonable. What requires to be represented in a reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as qualities, capacities, interests, and types. Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions in society. Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent opinions; all democracies, therefore, are unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber composed of more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong democracy stands as much in need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a democratic spur. And let it never be forgotten—what democracies are far too apt to forget—that minorities have rights as well as majorities; nay, that one of the great ends to be achieved by a good government is to protect the few against the natural insolence of a majority glorying in its numbers, and hurried on by the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A state of society is not at all inconceivable in which the many shall make all the laws and monopolise all the offices of a fussy bureaucracy, while the few are burdened with all the taxes. Never too frequently can we repeat, in reference to all public acts, no less than to the conduct of individuals in private life, the great Aristotelian maxim that all extremes are wrong; that every force when in full action tends to an excess which for its own salvation must be met by a counterpoising force; that all good government, as all healthy existence, is the balance of opposites and the marriage of contraries; and that the more mettlesome the charger the more need of a firm rein and a cautious rider. He who overlooks this prime postulate of all sane action in this complex world may pile his democratic house tier above tier and enjoy his green conceit for a season; but the day of sore trial and civic storm is not far, when the rain shall descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat upon that house, and it will fall, because it was founded upon a dream.