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ON

CIVIL LIBERTY

AND SELF-GOVERNMENT.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

We live at a period when it is the duty of reflecting men to ponder conscientiously these important questions: In what does civil liberty consist? How is it maintained? What are its means of self-diffusion, and under what forms do its chief dangers present themselves?

Our age, marked by restless activity in almost all departments of knowledge, and by struggles and aspirations before unknown, is stamped by no characteristic more deeply than by a desire to establish or extend freedom among the political societies of mankind. At no previous period, ancient or modern, has this impulse been felt at once so strongly and by such extensive numbers. The love of civil liberty is so leading a motive in our times, that no man who does not understand what civil liberty is has acquired that self-knowledge, without which we do not know where we stand, and are supernumeraries, or merely instinctive followers, rather than conscious working members, of our race in our day and generation.

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The first half of our century has produced more than three hundred political constitutions, some few of substance and sterling worth, many transient-like ephemeral beings, but all of them testifying to the endeavours of our age, and plainly pointing out the high problem that must be solved; many of them leaving roots in despite of their short existence, which some day will sprout and prosper. It is in history as in nature of all the seeds that germinate but few grow up to be trees, and of all the millions of blossoms but few ripen into fruit.

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Changes, frequently far greater than are felt by those who stand in the midst of them, have taken place; violent convulsions have shaken large and small countries, and blood has been shed. Blood has always flowed before great ideas could settle into actual institutions, or before the yearnings of humanity could become realities. Every marked struggle in the progress of civilization has its period of convulsion. Our race is in that period now, and thus our times resemble the epoch of the reformation.

Many who unreservedly adhere to the past, or who fear its evils less than those of change, resist the present longings of our kind, and seem to forget that change is always going on, whether we will or not. States consist of living beings, and life is change. Others seem to claim a right of revolution for governments, denying it to the people, and large portions of the people have overleaped civil liberty itself. They daringly disavow it, and pretend to believe that they find the solution of the great problem of our times either in an annihilation of individuality, or in an apotheosis of individual man, and preach communism, individual sovereignty, or the utmost concentration of all power and political action in one Cæsar. "Parliamentary liberty" is a term sneeringly

used in whole countries, to designate what they consider an obsolete encumbrance, and decaying remnants of a political phase belonging to the past. The representative system is laughed at, and the idol of monarchical and popular absolutism is draped anew, and worshipped by thousands, as if it were the latest avatar of their political god.

We must find our way through these mazes. This is one of our duties, because it has pleased Providence to cast our lot in the middle of the nineteenth century, and because an earnest man ought to know, above all social things, his own times.

Besides these general considerations, weighty as they are, there are others which press more immediately upon ourselves. Most of us descend in blood, and all of us politically, from that nation to which has been assigned, in common with ourselves, the high duty of developing modern civil liberty, and whose manliness and wisdom, combined with a certain historical good fortune, which enabled it to turn to advantage elements that proved sources of evils elsewhere, have saved it from the blight of absorbing centralization. England was the earliest country to put an end to feudal isolation, while still retaining independent institutions, and to unite the estates into a powerful general parliament, able to protect the nation against the crown. There too, centuries ago, trials for high treason were surrounded with peculiar safeguards, besides those known in common criminal trials in favour of the accused-an exception the very reverse of which we observe in all other European countries down to the most recent times, and in most to this day. In England we first see applied, in practice and on a grand scale, the idea which came originally from the Netherlands, that liberty must not be a boon

of the government, but that government must derive its rights from the people. Here, too, the people always clung to the right to tax themselves, and here, from the earliest times, the administration of justice has been separated from the other functions of government, and devolved upon magistrates set apart for this end, a separation not yet found in all countries.' In England, power of all kind, even of the crown, has ever bowed, at least theoretically, to the supremacy of the law; and that country may claim the imperishable glory of having formed a national representative system of two houses, governed by a parliamentary law of their own, with that important element, at once conservative and progressive, of a lawful loyal opposition. It is that country which alone saved judicial and political publicity when secresy prevailed everywhere else, which retained a self-developing common law, and established the trial by jury. In England, the principles of self-government were not swept away, and all the chief principles and guarantees of her great charter and the petition of rights have passed over into our constitutions.

We belong to the Anglican tribe, which carries Anglican principles and liberty over the globe, because, wherever it moves, liberal institutions and a common law full of

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1 I do not only allude to such bodies as the French parliaments, but to the fact that down to this century the continental courts of justice conducted, in innumerable cases, what is now frequently called the administrative business, such as collecting taxes, letting crown domains, superintending roads and bridges. The early separation of the English judge-I do not speak of his independence, which is of much later date,-and the early, comparatively speaking, independent position of the English Church, seem to me two of the most significant facts in English history.

2 Even a Henry the Eighth took care to have first the law changed when it could not be bent to his tyrannical acts. Despots in other countries did not take this trouble; and I do not know whether the history of any other period impresses the student with that peculiar meaning which the English word Law has acquired, more forcibly than this very reign of tyranny and royal bloodshed.

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