SECESSION AND CONSTITU

TIONAL LIBERTY

PREFACE

"MR. BRYCE. . . intimated . . . a decided doubt whether the conflict in question would, as an historical episode and incident in the great evolutionary record, hereafter loom up in the same large proportions it always must bear in the minds of those of the American generations directly concerned in it. The issues, he more than hinted, were in his judgment of no great fundamental importance . . . I . . . failed ... to concur in Mr. Bryce's judgment; for the more I reflected. the more I felt convinced that, as the years rolled by . . the conflict he had referred to as now forgotten in Europe would assume ever larger world-proportions and become matter of more careful general study. In a word, our American Civil War would, when the final verdict is rendered, . . . become an accepted episode of . . . worldwide moment."*

"Hardly any problem affecting the future of humanity is more important than the type and character which the great Republic of the West is hereafter destined to assume."+

If one accepts Mr. Adams's estimate of the moment of "our Civil War" (and to reject it consistently one must also widely differ from Mr. Lecky), how can the discussion of a political doctrine, the cause of so momentous an episode, be, as the former designates it, "academic"?

The word is used by him (and by others) to characterize a

* Charles Francis Adams, "Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity," pp. 12, 13; Oxford, 1913.

† Lecky, "Democracy and Liberty," p. 209.

question which has lost interest for "practical" men,-having been settled by force,-and, so used, is a narcotic to prolong the sleep of Liberty. Academic! If this question be "academic," what of that which developed into the Revolution of '76? It is a far cry indeed from a time when a theory of government, unaccompanied by oppression, aroused colonies, probably as free as any in the world's history, to rebellion,* to a time when a question involving (if Mr. Lecky be correct) "the future of humanity" has become "academic." Can a people so change? Or is man so constituted, alieni appetens, sui profusus, that where a thousand men will cheerfully give life for a shred of the cheapest sentiment, for an airy nothing of belief at once unknowable and incredible, for a rag of vanity, scarce a score can live in respect for their own or their neighbour's rights?

"Then was the time to tell of virtue being raised from the dungeon, where priests and tyrants had confined her; and that science had been courted from the skies to meet her; then was the time to talk of restoring the golden age, without being laughed at; and many seemed to believe that a political millennium was about to commence." †

"It was possible to break old traditions, to revise institutions, and to think out a new philosophy to fit an infant society. . It was a marvelous opportunity; to the student of history and human institutions it seems incredible that it ever could have been offered. The men who founded this republic recognized that opportunity and tried to use it." ‡

Its most distinguished contemporary (for he may fairly be so called) had written not long before:

"Je conçois qu'on ne doit trouver sur la terre que très-peu de républiques. Les hommes sont rarement dignes de se gouverner eux-mêmes. Ce bonheur ne doit appartenir qu' à des petits peuples, qui se cachent dans les îles, ou entre des montagnes, comme des lapins qui se dérobent aux animaux

* Appendix 45.

+Fisher Ames.

"War, and Other Essays," by William Graham Sumner.

carnassiers; mais, à la longue, ils sont découverts et dévorés." *

The words and work of "the men who founded this republic" show the countervailing principle upon which they worked. "Si une rêpublique est petite, elle est détruite par une force etrangère; si elle est grande, elle se détruit par un vice intérieur... aussi il y a grande apparence que les hommes auraient étê à la fin obligés de vivre toujours sous le gouvernement d'un seul, s'ils n'avient imaginé une manière de constitution qui a tous les avantages intêrieurs du gouvernement républicain et la force extérieure du monarchique. Je parle de la république fedêrative." It is not necessary to adopt that exaggerated tone of reverence, fashionable among us, as to either the men or their work. That they were actuated by the usual aims and ambitions of mankind their proceedings amply show. Yet, also, they were capable of estimating what their task meant. Before Mr. Lecky, they felt that their work "affected the future of humanity." Hamilton begins The

Federalist:

"You are called upon to deliberate on a new constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences, nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire, in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis, at which we are arrived, may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”

*Voltaire, "Dictionnaire Philosophique."

† Montesquieu, "De l'Esprit des Lois." Book 9, Chap. 1.

From the inaugural of Washington to the ephemeral newspaper letter of the period, the same note of free choice, of government founded, not upon force, but free assent, and instituted for "the safety and welfare of the parts which composed" the Union, is everywhere struck, the more significantly that many of the leaders preferred a government more consolidated and coercive than they were able to achieve.1

Was it all a fairy tale? Men had died happy that the eyes of Liberty, opened to their dying kiss as they broke the hedge of bayonets, would never again be closed by force or fraud. Little more than a hundred years later, within the easy span of two lives, indeed, while one then born might conceivably still be living, we are told that discussion of the most vital point of this momentous matter is "academic," in that it has been settled by war; i. e., that "the question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good governments from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force," has been decided by force.

Not only does the word "academic" thus restore those political ideals which the men of the Constitution supposed themselves to have shattered; it denies the teaching of history, throughout which force appears as the arbiter of the moment, indeed, yet fundamentally episodic. Reason, organically slow -reacting against force only when the ill effects of the latter become so general as to be inevitably obvious to the lower average of the majority mind-finally confirms or annuls its judgment: as nature, in the physical world, renders once more fertile the débris of its own convulsions. The principle is written throughout human progress. Without it there could not have been progress.

It is true that,

"During the war, necessity" [or what was considered such] "took the place of the Constitution, and we see the written guarantees of liberty grow dim in the smoke of battle. There is no statute of limitation in the law of cause and effect, and the usurpations of the war and Reconstruction days are

the fundamental causes of the existing conditions to-day."

The immediate results of a war may be readily pointed out: "Our Civil War may serve as an example . . . Think of the doctrines which were set aside as false, and of the others which were established as true . . . of the constitutional principles which were permanently stamped as heretical or orthodox.” † "A strong government was needed; and that fact has opened the way for Congress to interfere with private business, for instance in changing the tariff . . . much more frequently and extensively . . . Another significant fact is that the old controversy about internal improvements has died away since our government was centralised by war; and much money is wasted under that pretext by Congress." ‡

Yet, in a larger sense, there is "a statute of limitation in the law of cause and effect."

Political, like physical, disease, if within a nation's recuperative strength, permits recovery; if not, a people (as such) dies, to be succeeded by a healthier organism.

From this point of view, then, inquiry cannot be "academic," unless the doctrine of secession has been effectively denied by reason, finally confirming the decree of force. But nothing could be more absurd than this supposition; a vast majority of those citizens upon whose intelligent understanding of the past must depend the welfare of the future do not even know what that doctrine is, still less the facts for, or against, it.

Although a voluminous literature on the subject might indicate that reason has already held its session, it may be said that even a true issue between the opposing doctrines has not been fully made up. Confusion of thought, political and ethical sophistry, and falsification of fact have made a Lernean marsh, wherein hydra-headed error is yet to be destroyed before the point is even attained where honest and informed divergence of opinion is generally possible.

* Franklin Pierce, "Federal Usurpation"; N. Y., 1908. † William Graham Sumner, "War."

Frederick May Holland, "Liberty in the 19th Century"; N. Y., 1899. Cf. Appendix 6.