chapter xiii.: publicity.

18. We now approach those guarantees of liberty which relate more especially to the government of a free country, and the character of its polity. The first of all we have to mention under this head is publicity of public business. This implies the publicity of legislatures and judicial courts, as well as of all minor transactions that can in their nature be transacted publicly, and also the publication of all important documents and reports, treaties, and whatever else can interest the people at large. It further implies the perfect freedom with which reporters may publish the transactions of public bodies. Without the latter, the admission of the public would hardly amount in our days to any publicity at all. We do not assemble in the markets as the people of antiquity did. The millions depending upon public information, in our national states, could not meet in the assembly, as was possible in the ancient city-states, even if we had not a representative government. The public journals are in some respects to modern freemen what the agora was to the Athenian, the forum to the Roman. A modern free city-state can be imagined without a public press; a modern free country cannot; although we must never forget the gigantic, and therefore dangerous, power which, under certain circumstances, a single public journal may obtain, and, consequently, ought to be counteracted by the means which lie in the publicity and freedom of the press itself.

Publicity, in connection with civil liberty, means publicity in the transaction of the business of the public, in all branches—publicity in the great process by which public opinion passes over into public will, which is legislation; and publicity in the elaboration of the opinion of the public, as well as in the process of ascertaining or enouncing it by elections. Hence the radical error of secret political societies in free countries. They are intrinsically, hostile to liberty.

Important as the printing of transactions, reports, and documents is, it is nevertheless true that oral discussions are a most important feature of Anglican publicity of legislative, judicial, and of many of the common administrative transactions. Modern centralized absolutism has developed a system of writing and secrecy, and consequent formalism, abhorrent to free citizens who exist and feed upon the living word of liberty. Bureaucracy is founded upon writing, liberty on the breathing; word. Extensive writing, pervading the minutest branches of the administration, is the most active assistant of modern centralization. It systematizes a police government in a degree which no one can conceive of that does not know it from personal observation and experience, and forms one of the greatest obstacles, perhaps the most serious difficulty, when nations, long accustomed to this all-penetrative agent of centralism, desire to establish liberty. I do not hesitate to point out orality, especially in the administration of justice, in legislation and local self-government, as an important element of our civil liberty. I do not believe that a high degree of liberty can be imagined without widely pervading orality; but oral transaction alone is no indication of liberty. The patriarchal and tribal governments of Asia, the chieftain government of our Indians, indeed all primitive governments, are carried on by oral transaction without any civil liberty.

Publicus, originally Populicus, meant that which relates to the Populus, to the state, and it is significant that the term gradually acquired the meaning of public, as we take it—as significant as it is that a great French philosopher, honored throughout our whole country, lately wrote to a friend: “Political matters here are no longer public matters.”

In free countries political matters relate to the people, and therefore ought to be public. Publicity informs of public matters; it teaches, and educates, and it binds together. There is no patriotism without publicity, and though publicity cannot always prevent mischief, it is at all events an alarm-bell, which calls the public attention to the spot of danger. In former times secrecy was considered indispensable in public matters; it is still so where cabinet policy is pursued, or monarchical absolutism sways; but these governments, also, have been obliged somewhat to yield to a better spirit, and the Russian government now publishes occasionally government reports.

That there are certain transactions which the public service requires to be withdrawn for a time from publicity is evident. We need point only to diplomatic transactions when not yet brought to a close. But even with reference to these it will be observed that a great change has been wrought in modern times, and comparatively a great degree of publicity now prevails in the foreign intercourse of nations—a change of which the United States have set the example. A state secret was formerly a potent word; while one of our first statesmen wrote to the author, many years ago, “I would not give a dime for all the secrets that people may imagine to be locked up in the United States archives.”

It is a remarkable fact that no law insures the publicity of the courts of justice, either in England or the United States. Our constitution secures neither the publicity of courts nor that of congress, and in England the admission of the public to the commons or the lords is merely by sufferance. The public may at any time be excluded merely by a member observing to the presiding officer that strangers are present, while we all know that the candid publication of the debates was not permitted in the time of Dr. Johnson. Yet so thoroughly is publicity now ingrained in the American and Englishman that a suppression of this precious principle cannot even be conceived of. If any serious attempt should be made to carry out the existing law in England, and the public were really excluded from the house of commons, a revolution would be unquestionably the consequence, and publicity would be added to the declaration of rights. We can no more imagine England or the United States without the reporting newspapers, than nature without the principle of vegetation.

Publicity pervaded the system of American politics so generally, that the framers of our constitution probably never thought of it, or, if they did, they did not think it worth while to provide for it in the constitution, since no one had doubted it. It is part and parcel of our common law of political existence. They did not trouble themselves with unnecessaries, or things which would have had a value only as possibly completing a certain symmetry of theory.

It is, however, interesting to note that the first distinctly authorized publicity of a legislative body in modern times was that of the Massachusetts house of representatives, which adopted it in 1766.

Publicity of speaking has its dangers, and occasionally exposes to grave inconveniences, as all guarantees do, and necessarily in a greater degree as they are of a more elementary character. It is the price at which we enjoy all excellence in this world. The science of politics and political ethics must point out the dangers as well as the formal and moral checks which may avert or migitate the evils arising from publicity in general, and public oral transaction of affairs in particular. It is not our business here. We treat of it in this place as a guarantee of liberty, and have to show its indispensableness. Those who know liberty as a practical and traditional reality and as a true business of life, as we do, know that the question is not whether it be better to have publicity or not, but, being obliged to have it, how we can best manage to avoid its dangers while we enjoy its fullest benefit and blessing It is the same as with the air we breathe. The question is not whether we ought to dispense with a free respiration of all-surrounding air, but how, with free inhalation, we may best guard ourselves against colds and other distempers caused by the elementary requisite of physical life, that we must live in the atmosphere.

Liberty, I said, is coupled with the public word, and however frequently the public word may be abused, it is nevertheless true that out of it arises oratory—the æsthetics of liberty. What would Greece and Rome be to us without their Demosthenes and Cicero? And what would their other writers have been, had not their languages been coined out by the orator? What would England be without her host of manly and masterly speakers? Who of us could wish to see the treasures of our own civilization robbed of the words contributed by our speakers, from Patrick Henry to Webster? The speeches of great orators are a fund of wealth for a free people, from which the school-boy begins to draw when he declaims from his Reader, and which enriches, elevates, and nourishes the souls of the old.

Publicity is indispensable to eloquence. No one speaks well in secret before a few. Orators are in this respect like poets—their kin, of whom Goethe, “one of the craft,” says that they cannot sing unless they are heard.

The abuse of public speaking has been alluded to. It is a frequent theme of blame and ridicule, frequently dwelt upon by those who disrelish “parliamentarism,” but it is necessary to observe that if civil liberty demands representative legislative bodies, which it assuredly does, these bodies have no meaning without exchange and mutual modification of ideas, without debate, and actual debate requires the spoken word. I consider it an evil hour not only for eloquence, but for liberty itself, when our senate first permitted one of its members to read his speeches, on account of some infirmity. The true principle has now been abandoned, and written speeches are almost as common in congress as they were in the former house of representatives of France, where, however, I may state on authority, they became rarer as constitutional liberty increased and developed its energy.

All governments hostile to liberty are hostile to publicity, and parliamentary eloquence is odious to them, because it is a great power which the executive can neither create nor control. There is in imperial France a positive hatred against the “tribune.” Mr. Cousin, desirous of leading his readers to compare the imperial system with that of the past governments since the restoration, says of the Bourbons that, whatever it may be the fashion to say of them, “they gave us at any rate the tribune,”(the public word,) while Mr. de Morny, brother of Napoleon III., issued a circular to the prefects, when minister of the interior, in 1852, in which the publicity of parliamentary government is called theatricals It is remarkable that this declaration should have come from a government which, above all others, seems, in a great measure to rely on military and other shows.

Publicity begets confidence, and confidence is indispensable for the government of free countries—it is the soul of loyalty in jealous freemen. This necessary influence is twofold—confidence in the government, and confidence of society in itself. It is with reference to the latter that secret political societies in free countries are essentially injurious to all liberty, in addition to their preventing the growth and development of manly character, and promoting vanity; that they are, as all secret societies must inherently be, submissive to secret superior will and decision,—a great danger in politics,—and unjust to the rest of the citizens, by deciding on public measures and men without the trial of public discussion, and by bringing the influence of a secretly united body to bear on the decision or election. Secret societies in free countries are cancers against which history teaches us that men who value their freedom ought to guard themselves most attentively. It would lead us too far from our topic were we to discuss the important fact that mysterious and secret societies belong to paganism rather than to Christianity, and we conclude these remarks by observing that those societies which may be called doubly secret, that is to say, societies which not only foster certain secrets and have secret transactions, but the members of which are bound to deny either the existence of the society or their membership, are schools of untruth; and that parents as well as teachers, in the United States, would do no more than perform a solemn duty, if they should use every means in their power to exhibit to those whose welfare is entrusted to them, the despicable character of the thousand juvenile secret societies which flourish in our land, and which are the preparatory schools for secret political societies.