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 in 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 instinctive followers, rather than conscious, working members of our race, in our day and generation.

The first half of our century has produced several hundred political constitutions, some few of substance and sterling worth, many transient like ephemeral beings, but all of them testifying to the endeavors 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 thousands, or even hundreds, ripen into fruit.

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—that blood which 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, under the name of coup d'état, but deny 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 or popular absolutism is draped anew, and worshipped by thousands as if it were the latest avatar of their political god. What, but a lustre or two ago, would have been universally considered impossible, has come to pass; Rousseau's hatred of representative government is loudly and largely professed in France, not only by the army and the faction which holds power, but also by the French republican of extreme views, to whom nothing is more odious than decentralized self-government; and the two seem perfectly to agree with the views lately proclaimed on an important occasion, that the essence of political civilization consists in universal suffrage and the code Napoleon, with which, and a moderately strong army, it would be easy to conquer Great Britain.

There are not a few in our own country who, seeing the perversion of principles and political corruption, follow the besetting fallacy of men, and seek salvation from one evil in its opposite, as if the means of escaping death by fire were freezing to death.

We must find our way through all 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 understand, above all other 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 evil 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 favor 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 countries 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 secrecy 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 Right have passed over into our constitutions.

We belong to the Anglican race, which carries Anglican principles and liberty over the globe, because wherever it moves, liberal institutions and a common law full of manly rights and instinct with the principle of an expansive life, accompany it. We belong to that race whose obvious task it is, among other proud and sacred tasks, to rear and spread civil liberty over vast regions in every part of the earth, on continent and isle. We belong to that tribe which alone has the word Self-Government. We belong to that nation whose great lot it is to be placed, with the full inheritance of freedom, on the freshest soil in the noblest site between Europe and Asia, a nation young, whose kindred countries, powerful in wealth, armies, and intellect, are old. It is a period when a peaceful migration of nations, similar in the weight of numbers to the warlike migration of the early middle ages, pours its crowd into the lap of our more favored land, there to try, and at times to test to the utmost, our institutions—institutions which are our foundations and buttresses, as the law which they embody and organize is our sole and sovereign master.

These are the reasons why it is incumbent upon every American again and again to present to his mind what his own liberty is, how he must guard and maintain it, and why, if he neglect it, he resembles the missionary that should proceed to convert the world without Bible or prayer-book. These are the reasons why I feel called upon to write this work, in addition to what I have given long ago in another place on the subjects of Justice, Law, the State, Government and Sovereignty, on Liberty and Right, and to which, therefore, I must refer my reader for many preliminary particulars; and these, too, are the reasons why I ask for an attention corresponding to the sense of responsibility with which I approach the great theme of political vitality—the leading subject of Western history and the characteristic stamp and feature of our race, our age, our own country and its calling.