Liberty,
next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and
the common pretext of crime, from the
sowing of the seed
at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was
gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of
a mature civilization; and scarcely a century has passed
since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved
to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its
natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of
conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving
for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. During
long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations
were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers,
and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving
men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made
them eager to sell their birthright for a pottage, and ignorant
of the treasure they resigned. At all times sincere friends
of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due
to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves
with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their
own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has
been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just ground
of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in
the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or
so difficult to overcome as uncertainty and confusion touching
the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought
much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its
advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge as much
as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions
is often a history of deception and illusions; for their
virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit
that preserves them; and the form may remain unaltered when
the substance has passed away.
A few familiar examples from modern politics
will explain why it is that the burden of my argument will
lie outside
the domain of legislation. It is often said that our constitution
attained its formal perfection in 1679, when the Habeas Corpus
Act was passed. Yet Charles II succeeded, only two years
later, in making himself independent of Parliament. In 1789,
while the States General assembled at Versailles, the Spanish
Cortes, older than Magna Charta and more venerable than our
House of Commons, were summoned after an interval of generations;
but they immediately prayed the King to abstain from consulting
them, and to make his reforms of his own wisdom and authority.
According to the common opinion, indirect elections are a
safeguard of conservatism. But all the assemblies of the
French Revolution issued from indirect election. A restricted
suffrage is another reputed security for monarchy. But the
parliament of Charles X, which was returned by 90,000 electors,
resisted and overthrew the throne; whilst the parliament
of Louis Philippe, chosen by a constituency of 250,000, obsequiously
promoted the reactionary policy of his ministers, and, in
the fatal division which, by rejecting reform, laid the monarchy
in the dust, Guizot’s majority was obtained by the
votes of 129 public functionaries. An unpaid legislature
is, for obvious reasons, more independent than most of the
continental legislatures which receive pay. But it would
be unreasonable in America to send a member as far as from
here to Constantinople to live for twelve months at his own
expense in the dearest of capital cities. Legally and to
outward seeming the American President is the successor of
Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by
the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President
differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the
Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy; for he is
expected to make 70,000 changes in the public service: fifty
years ago John Quincy Adams dismissed only two men. The purchase
of judicial appointments is manifestly indefensible; yet
in the old French monarchy that monstrous practice created
the only corporation able to resist the King. Official corruption,
which would ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary
relief from the pressure of absolutism. There are conditions
in which it is scarcely a hyperbole to say that slavery itself
is a stage on the road to freedom. Therefore we are not so
much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts
and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men. A century
ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience
of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no
man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer
the idea that it might be well to question and examine with
rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things
were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear
hard intellect of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political
calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen.
It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine,
or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the
acts of fifty parliaments; and our cause owes more to Cicero
and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville than to the laws of
Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France.
By liberty I mean the assurance that every
man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty,
against the
influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line
between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere. Beyond
the limit of things necessary for its wellbeing, it can only
give indirect help to fight the battle of life, by promoting
the influences which avail against temptation,—Religion,
Education, and the distribution of Wealth. In ancient times
the state absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded
on the domain of personal freedom. In the middle ages it
possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude.
Modern states fall habitually into both excesses. The most
certain test by which we judge whether a country is really
free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty,
by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian
of Religion; and it is in the history of the chosen People,
accordingly, that the first illustrations of my subject are
obtained. The government of the Israelites was a Federation,
held together by no political authority, but by the unity
of race and faith, and founded, not on physical force, but
on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government
was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group
of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege
of rank, nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien
to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted
by Samuel in that momentous protestation and warning which
all the kingdoms of Asia and many of the kingdoms of Europe
have unceasingly confirmed. The throne was erected on a compact;
and the King was deprived of the right of legislation among
a people that recognized no lawgiver but God, whose highest
aim in politics was to restore the original purity of the
constitution, and to make its government conform to the ideal
type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired
men who rose up in unfailing succession to prophesy against
the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the
laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers,
and appealed from the established authorities, from the king,
the priests, and the princes of the people, to the healing
forces that slept in the uncorrupted conscience of the masses.
Thus the example of the Hebrew nation laid down the parallel
lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine
of national tradition, and the doctrine of the higher law;
the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process
of development and not of essential change; and the principle
that all political authorities must be tested and reformed
according to a code which was not made by man. The operation
of these two principles, in unison or in antagonism, occupies
the whole of the space we are going over together.
The conflict between Liberty under divine authority and
the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. In
the year 622 a supreme effort was made at Jerusalem to reform
and to preserve the state. The High Priest produced from
the temple of Jehova the Book of the deserted and forgotten
Law, and both king and people bound themselves by solemn
oaths to observe it. But that early example of limited Monarchy
and of the supremacy of law neither lasted nor spread; and
the forces by which Freedom has conquered must be sought
elsewhere. In the very year 586, in which the flood of Asiatic
despotism closed over the city which had been and was destined
again to be the sanctuary of Freedom in the East, a new home
was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea,
and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant
was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending
its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the
civilized world.
According to a famous saying of the most famous authoress
of the continent, Liberty is ancient; and it is Despotism
that is new. It has been the pride of recent historians to
vindicate the truth of that maxim. The heroic age of Greece
confirms it, and it is still more conspicuously true of Teutonic
Europe. Wherever we can trace the earlier life of the Aryan
nations we discover germs which favouring circumstances and
assiduous culture might have developed into free societies.
They exhibit some sense of common interest in common concerns,
little reverence for external authority, and an imperfect
sense of the function and supremacy of the state. Where the
division of property and of labour is incomplete, there is
little division of classes and of power. Until societies
are tried by the complex problems of civilization they may
escape despotism, as societies that are undisturbed by religious
diversity avoid persecution. In general, the forms of the
patriarchal age failed to resist the growth of absolute states
when the difficulties and temptations of advancing life began
to tell; and with one sovereign exception, which is not within
my scope to-day, it is scarcely possible to trace their survival
in the institutions of later times. Six hundred years before
the Birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout
the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests
and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books
requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no
preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers
passed to aristocracies of birth. What followed, during many
generations, was the cruel domination of class over class,
the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant
by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate
utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,
a man of genius and refinement, who avows that he longed
to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these
oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in
the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The
remedy gave new shape and new energy to the evil. The tyrants
were often men of surprising capacity and merit, like some
of those who, in the fourteenth century, made themselves
lords of Italian cities; but rights secured by equal laws
and by sharing power existed nowhere.
From this universal degradation the world was rescued by
the most gifted of the nations. Athens, which like other
cities was distracted and oppressed by a privileged class,
avoided violence and appointed Solon to revise its laws.
It was the happiest choice that history records. Solon was
not only the wisest man to be found in Athens, but the most
profound political genius of antiquity; and the easy, bloodless,
and pacific revolution by which he accomplished the deliverance
of his country was the first step in a career which our age
glories in pursuing, and instituted a power which has done
more than anything, except revealed religion, for the regeneration
of society. The upper class had possessed the right of making
and administering the laws, and he left them in possession,
only transferring to wealth what had been the privilege of
birth. To the rich, who alone had the means of sustaining
the burden of public service in taxation and war, Solon gave
a share of power proportioned to the demands made on their
resources. The poorest classes were exempt from direct taxes,
but were excluded from office. Solon gave them a voice in
electing magistrates from the classes above them, and the
right of calling them to account. This concession, apparently
so slender, was the beginning of a mighty change. It introduced
the idea that a man ought to have a voice in selecting those
to whose rectitude and wisdom he is compelled to trust his
fortune, his family, and his life. And this idea completely
inverted the notion of human authority, for it inaugurated
the reign of moral influence where all political power had
depended on physical force. Government by consent superseded
government by compulsion, and the pyramid which had stood
on a point was made to stand upon its base. By making every
citizen the guardian of his own interest, Solon admitted
the element of Democracy into the State. The greatest glory
of a ruler, he said, is to create a popular government. Believing
that no man can be entirely trusted, he subjected all who
exercised power to the vigilant control of those for whom
they acted.
The only resource against political disorders that had been
known till then was the concentration of power. Solon undertook
to effect the same object by the distribution of power. He
gave to the common people as much influence as he thought
them able to employ, that the State might be exempt from
arbitrary government. It is the essence of Democracy, he
said, to obey no master but the law. Solon recognised the
principle that political forms are not final or invariable,
and must adapt themselves to facts; and he provided so well
for the revision of his constitution, without breach of continuity,
or loss of stability that, for centuries after his death
the Attic orators attributed to him, and quoted by his name
the whole structure of Athenian law. The direction of its
growth was determined by the fundamental doctrine of Solon,
that political power ought to be commensurate with public
service. In the Persian war the services of the Democracy
eclipsed those of the patrician orders, for the fleet that
swept the Asiatics from the Aegean Sea was manned by the
poorer Athenians. That class whose valour had saved the state,
and had preserved European civilization, had gained a title
to increase of influence and privilege. The offices of state,
which had been a monopoly of the rich were thrown open to
the poor, and in order to make sure that they should obtain
their share, all but the highest commands were distributed
by lot.
Whilst the ancient authorities were decaying, there was
no accepted standard of moral and political right to make
the framework of society fast in the midst of change. The
instability which had seized on the forms threatened the
very principles of government. The national beliefs were
yielding to doubt, and doubt was not yet making way for knowledge.
There had been a time when the obligations of public as well
as private life were identified with the will of the gods.
But that time had passed. Pallas, the ethereal goddess of
the Athenians, and the Sun god whose oracles delivered from
the temple between the twin summits of Parnassus did so much
for the Greek nationality, aided in keeping up a lofty ideal
of religion; but when the enlightened men of Greece learnt
to apply their keen faculty of reasoning to the system of
their inherited belief they became quickly conscious that
the conceptions of the gods corrupted the life and degraded
the minds of the people. Popular morality could not be sustained
by the popular religion. The moral instruction which was
no longer supplied by the gods could not yet be found in
books. There was no venerable code expounded by experts,
no doctrine proclaimed by men of reputed sanctity like those
teachers of the far East whose words still rule the faith
of nearly half mankind. The effort to account for things
by close observation and exact reasoning began by destroying.
There came a time when the philosophers of the Porch and
the Academy wrought the dictates of wisdom and virtue into
a system so consistent and profound that it has vastly shortened
the task of the Christian divines. But that time has not
yet come.
The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks
passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light
of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to
substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired
authorities which was then beginning to absorb the energies
of the Greek intellect is the grandest movement in the profane
annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable
progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy,
and far the better part of all the political knowledge we
possess. Pericles, who was at the head of the Athenian government,
was the first statesman who encountered the problem which
the rapid weakening of traditions forced on the political
world. No authority in morals or in politics remained unshaken
by the motion that was in the air. No guide could be confidently
trusted; there was no available criterion to appeal to, for
the means of controlling or denying convictions that prevailed
among the people. The popular sentiment as to what was right
might be mistaken, but it was subject to no test. The people
were, for practical purposes, the seat of the knowledge of
good and evil. The people, therefore, were the seat of power.
The political philosophy of Pericles consisted of this conclusion.
He resolutely struck away all the props that still sustained
the artificial preponderance of wealth. For the ancient doctrine
that power goes with land, he introduced the idea that power
ought to be so equitably diffused as to afford equal security
to all. That one part of the community should govern the
whole, or that one class should make laws for another, he
declared to be tyrannical. The abolition of privilege would
have served only to transfer the supremacy from the rich
to the poor, if Pericles had not redressed the balance by
restricting the rights of citizenship to Athenians of pure
descent. By this measure the class which formed what we should
call the third estate was brought down to 14,000 citizens,
and became about equal in numbers with the higher ranks.
Pericles held that every Athenian who neglected to take his
part in the public business inflicted an injury on the commonwealth.
That none might be excluded by poverty he caused the poor
to be paid for their attendance out of the funds of the state;
for his administration of the federal tribute had brought
together a treasure of more than two millions sterling. The
instrument of his sway was the art of speaking. He governed
by persuasion. Everything was decided by argument in open
deliberation; and every influence bowed before the ascendancy
of mind. The idea that the object of constitutions is not
to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent
it, to preserve with equal care the independence of labour
and the security of property, to make the rich safe against
envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest
level attained by the statesmanship of Greece. It hardly
survived the great patriot who conceived it; and all history
has been occupied with the endeavour to upset the balance
of power by giving the advantage to money, land, or numbers.
A generation followed that has never been equaled in talent,
a generation of men whose works, in poetry and eloquence
are still the envy of the world, and in history, philosophy,
and politics, remain unsurpassed. But it produced no successor
to Pericles; and no man was able to wield the sceptre that
fell from his hand.
It was a momentous step in the progress of nations when
the principle that every interest should have the right and
the means of asserting itself was adopted by the Athenian
constitution. But for those who were beaten in the vote there
was no redress. The law did not check the triumph of majorities,
or rescue the minority from the dire penalties of having
been outnumbered. When the overwhelming influence of Pericles
was removed, the conflict between classes raged without restraint;
and the slaughter that befell the higher ranks in the Peloponnesian
war gave an irresistible preponderance to the lower. The
restless and inquiring spirit of the Athenians was prompt
to unfold the reason of every institution and the consequences
of every principle, and their constitution ran its course
from infancy to decrepitude, with unexampled speed.
Two men’s lives span the interval from
the first admission of popular influence under Solon, to
the downfall of the
state. Their history furnishes the classic example of the
peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable.
For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable
of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of
the Greeks. They venerated the constitution which had given
them prosperity and equality and the pride of freedom, and
never questioned the fundamental laws which regulated the
enormous power of the Assembly. They tolerated considerable
variety of opinion, and great license of speech; and their
humanity towards their slaves roused the indignation even
of the most intelligent partisan of aristocracy. Thus they
became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic
institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which
corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds
the understanding of monarchs exercised its demoralizing
influence on the illustrious Democracy of Athens. It is bad
to be oppressed by a minority; but it is worse to be oppressed
by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in
the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority
can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire
people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
The humblest and most numerous class of the Athenians united
the legislative, the judicial, and in part, the executive
power. The philosophy that was then in the ascendant taught
them that there is no law superior to that of the state,
and that, in the state, the law-giver is above the law.
It followed that the sovereign people had a right to do
whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of
right and wrong but its own judgment of expediency. On a
memorable occasion the assembled Athenians declared it monstrous
that they should be prevented from doing whatever they chose.
No force that existed could restrain them; and they resolved
that no duty should restrain them, and that they would be
bound by no laws that were not of their own making. In this
way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and
their government, the pioneer of European Freedom, stands
condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of
the ancients. They ruined their city by attempting to conduct
war by debate in the market-place. Like the French Republic
they put their unsuccessful commanders to death. They treated
their dependencies with such injustice that they lost their
maritime empire. They plundered the rich, until the rich
conspired with the public enemy; and they crowned their guilt
by the martyrdom of Socrates.
When the absolute sway of numbers had endured for near a
quarter of a century, nothing but bare existence was left
for the state to lose; and the Athenians, wearied and despondent,
confessed the true cause of their ruin. They understood that
for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary
that the Democracy should restrain itself as it had been
that it should restrain the Oligarchy. They resolved to take
their stand once more upon the ancient ways, and to restore
the order of things which had subsisted when the monopoly
of power had been taken from the rich and had not been acquired
by the poor. After a first restoration had failed, which
is only memorable because Thucydides, whose judgment in politics
is never at fault, pronounced it the best government Athens
had enjoyed, the attempt was renewed with more experience
and greater singleness of purpose. The hostile parties were
reconciled, and proclaimed an amnesty, the first in history.
They resolved to govern by concurrence. The laws which had
the sanction of tradition, were reduced to a code; and no
act of the sovereign assembly was valid with which they might
be found to disagree. Between the sacred lines of the constitution
which were to remain inviolate, and the decrees which met
from time to time the needs and notions of the day, a broad
distinction was drawn; and the fabric of law which had been
the work of generations was made independent of momentary
variations in the popular will. The repentance of the Athenians
came too late to save the Republic. But the lesson of their
experience endures for all time, for it teaches that government
by the whole people, being the government of the most numerous
and most powerful class, is an evil of the same nature as
unmixed monarchy, and requires, for nearly the same reasons,
institutions that shall protect it against itself, and shall
uphold the permanent reign of law against arbitrary revolutions
of opinion.
Parallel with the rise and fall of Athenian freedom, Rome
was employed in working out the same problems, with greater
constructive sense, and greater temporary success, but ending
at last in a far more terrible catastrophe. That which among
the ingenious Athenians had been a development carried forward
by the spell of plausible argument, was in Rome a conflict
between rival forces. Speculative politics had no attraction
for the grim and practical genius of the Romans. They did
not consider what would be the cleverest way of getting over
a difficulty, but what way was indicated by analogous cases;
and they assigned less influence to the impulse and spirit
of the moment, than to precedent and example. Their peculiar
character prompted them to ascribe the origin of their laws
to early times, and in their desire to justify the continuity
of their institutions and to get rid of the reproach of innovation,
they imagined the legendary history of the Kings of Rome.
The energy of their adherence to traditions made their progress
slow, they advanced only under compulsion of almost unavoidable
necessity, and the same questions recurred often before they
were settled. The constitutional history of the Republic
turns on the endeavors of the aristocracy, who claimed to
be the only true Romans, to retain in their hands the power
they had wrested from the Kings, and of the plebeians to
get an equal share in it. And this controversy, which the
eager and restless Athenians went through in one generation,
lasted for more than two centuries, from a time when the
plebs were excluded from the government of the city, and
were taxed, and made to serve without pay, until, in the
year 285, they were admitted to political equality. Then
followed 150 years of unexampled prosperity and glory; and
then, out of the original conflict which had been compromised,
if not theoretically settled, a new struggle arose which
was without an issue.
The mass of poorer families, impoverished by incessant service
in war, were reduced to dependence on an aristocracy of about
2000 wealthy men, who divided among themselves the immense
domains of the state. When the need became intense the Gracchi
tried to relieve it by inducing the richer classes to allot
some share in the public lands to the common people. The
old and famous aristocracy of birth and rank had made a stubborn
resistance, but it knew the art of yielding. The later and
more selfish aristocracy was unable to learn it. The character
of the people was changed by the sterner motives of dispute.
The fight for political power had been carried on with the
moderation which is so honourable a quality of party contests
in England. But the struggle for the objects of material
existence grew to be as ferocious as civil controversies
in France. Repulsed by the rich after a struggle of 22 years,
the people, 320,000 of whom depended on public rations for
food, were ready to follow any man who promised to obtain
for them by revolution what they could not obtain by law.
For a time the Senate, representing the ancient and threatened
order of things, was strong enough to overcome every popular
leader that arose, until Julius Caesar supported by an army
which he had led in an unparalleled career of conquest, and
by the famished masses which he won by his lavish liberality,
and skilled beyond all other men in the imperial art of governing,
converted the Republic into a Monarchy by a series of measures
that were neither violent nor injurious.
The Empire preserved the republican forms until the reign
of Diocletian; but the will of the Emperors was as uncontrolled
as that of the people had been after the victory of the Tribunes.
Their power was arbitrary, even when it was most wisely employed;
and yet the Roman Empire rendered greater services to the
cause of Liberty than the Roman Republic. I do not mean by
reason of the temporary accident that there were emperors
who made good use of their immense opportunities, such as
Nerva, of whom Tacitus says that he combined Monarchy and
Liberty, things otherwise incompatible; or that the empire
was what its panegyrists declared it, the perfection of Democracy.
In truth it was at best, an illdisguised and odious despotism.
But Frederic the Great was a despot; yet he was a friend
to toleration and free discussion. The Bonapartes were despotic;
yet no liberal ruler was ever more acceptable to the masses
of the people than the First Napoleon, after he had destroyed
the Republic, in 1805, and the Third Napolean, at the height
of his power in 1859. In the same way, the Roman empire possessed
merits which, at a distance, and especially at a great distance
of time, concern men more deeply than the tragic tyranny
which was felt in the neighbourhood of the palace. The poor
had what they had demanded in vain of the Republic. The rich
fared better than during the Triumvirate. The rights of Roman
citizens were extended to the people of the Provinces. To
the imperial epoch belong the better part of Roman literature
and nearly the entire Civil Law; and it was the Empire that
mitigated slavery, instituted religious toleration, made
a beginning of the law of nations, and created a perfect
system of the law of property. The Republic which Caesar
overthrew had been anything but a free state. It provided
admirable securities for the rights of citizens; it treated
with savage disregard the rights of men; and allowed the
free Roman to inflict atrocious wrongs on his children, on
debtors and dependents, on prisoners and slaves. Those deeper
ideas of right and duty which are not found on the tables
of municipal law, but with which the generous minds of Greece
were conversant, were held of little account, and the philosophy
which dealt with such speculations was repeatedly proscribed,
as a teacher of sedition and impiety.
At length, in the year 155, the Athenian philosopher Carneades
appeared at Rome, on a political mission. During an interval
of official business, he delivered two public orations, to
give the unlettered conquerors of his country a taste of
the disputations that flourished in the Attic schools. On
the first day he discoursed of natural justice. On the next
he denied its existence, arguing that all our notions of
good and evil are derived from positive enactment. From the
time of that memorable display, the genius of the vanquished
people held its conquerors in thrall. The most eminent of
the public men of Rome, such as Scipio and Cicero, formed
their minds on Grecian models, and her jurists underwent
the rigorous discipline of Zeno and Chrysippus.
If, drawing the limit in the second century, when the influence
of Christianity becomes perceptible, we should form our judgment
of the politics of antiquity by its actual legislation, our
estimate would be low. The prevailing notions of freedom
were imperfect, and the endeavours to realize them were wide
of the mark. The ancients understood the regulation of power
better than the regulation of liberty. They concentrated
so many prerogatives on the state as to leave no footing
from which a man could deny its jurisdiction or assign bounds
to its activity. If I may employ an expressive anachronism,
the vice of the classic state was that it was both Church
and State in one. Morality was undistinguished from religion,
and politics from morals; and in religion, morality and politics
there was only one legislator and one authority. The state,
while it did deplorably little for education, for practical
science, for the indigent and helpless, or for the spiritual
needs of man, nevertheless claimed the use of all his faculties
and the determination of all his duties. Individuals and
families, associations and dependencies were so much material
that the sovereign power consumed for its own purposes. What
the slave was in the hands of his master the citizen was
in the hands of the community. The most sacred obligations
vanished before the public advantage. The passengers existed
for the sake of the ship. By their disregard for private
interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the
people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements
on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by
the decay of families and the depopulation of the country.
They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas,
and by their ideas, especially on the art of government,
they are
“The dead, but sceptred sovereigns
who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.”
To them, indeed, may be tracked nearly all
the errors that are undermining political society—Communism,
Utilitarianism, the confusion between tyranny and authority,
and between
lawlessness and freedom.
The notion that men lived originally in a state of nature,
by violence and without laws, is due to Critias. Communism
in its grossest form was recommended by Diogenes of Sinope.
According to the Sophists, there is no duty above expediency,
and no virtue apart from pleasure. Laws are an invention
of weak men to rob their betters of the reasonable enjoyment
of their superiority. It is better to inflict than to suffer
wrong; and as there is no greater good than to do evil without
fear of retribution, so there is no worse evil than to suffer
without the consolation of revenge. Justice is the mask of
a craven spirit; injustice is worldly wisdom; and duty, obedience,
self-denial are the impostures of hypocrisy. Government is
absolute, and may ordain what it pleases; and no subject
can complain that it does him wrong; but as long as he can
escape compulsion and punishment, he is always free to disobey.
Happiness consists in obtaining power, and in eluding the
necessity of obedience; and he that gains a throne, by perfidy
and murder, deserves to be truly envied.
Epicurus differed but little from these propounders of the
code of revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said,
are founded on contract for mutual protection. Good and evil
are conventional terms, for the thunderbolts of heaven fall
alike on the just and on the unjust. The objection to wrongdoing
is not in the act but in its consequences to the wrongdoer.
Wise men contrive laws, not to bind, but to protect themselves;
and when they prove to be unprofitable they cease to be valid.
The illiberal sentiments of even the most illustrious metaphysicians
are disclosed in the saying of Aristotle, that the mark of
the worst governments is that they leave men free to live
as they please.
If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the
best of the pagans, knew of no higher criterion for men,
of no better
guide of conduct than the laws of each country; that Plato,
whose sublime doctrine was so near an anticipation of Christianity
that celebrated theologians wished his works to be forbidden,
lest men should be content with them, and indifferent to
any higher dogma,—to whom was granted that prophetic
vision of the Just Man, accused, condemned, and scourged,
and dying on a Cross,—nevertheless employed the most
splendid intellect ever bestowed on man, to advocate the
abolition of the family and the exposure of infants; that
Aristotle, the ablest moralist of antiquity, saw no harm
in making raids upon neighbouring people for the sake of
reducing them to slavery,—still more, if you will consider
that, among the moderns, men of genius equal to these have
held political doctrines not less criminal or absurd—it
will be apparent to you how stubborn a phalanx of error blocks
the paths of Truth; that pure Reason is as powerless as Custom
to solve the problem of free government; that it can only
be the fruit of long, manifold, and painful experience; and
that the tracing of the methods by which divine wisdom has
educated the nations to appreciate and to assume the duties
of Freedom, is not the least part of that true philosophy
that studies to
“Assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
But, having sounded the depth of their errors,
I should give you a very inadequate idea of the wisdom
of the ancients,
if I allowed it to appear that their precepts were no better
than their practice. While statesmen and senates and popular
assemblies supplied examples of every description of blunder,
a noble literature arose, in which a priceless treasure of
political knowledge was stored and in which the defects of
the existing institutions were exposed with unsparing sagacity.
The point on which the ancients were most nearly unanimous
is the right of the people to govern, and their inability
to govern alone. To meet this difficulty, to give to the
popular element a full share, without a monopoly, of power,
they adopted very generally the theory of a mixed constitution.
They differed from our notion of the same thing, because
modern constitutions have been a device for limiting monarchy;
with them they were invented to curb Democracy. The idea
arose in the time of Plato—though he repelled it—when
the early monarchies and oligarchies had vanished; and it
continued to be cherished long after all democracies had
been absorbed in the Roman Empire. But whereas a sovereign
prince who surrenders part of his authority yields to the
argument of superior force; a sovereign people, relinquishing
its own prerogative, succumbs to the influence of Reason.
And it has in all times proved more easy to create limitations
by the use of force than by persuasion.
The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle
of government standing alone, is carried to excess and provokes
a reaction. Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy
contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy
of numbers. They therefore imagined that to restrain each
element by combining it with the others, would avert the
natural process of self-destruction, and endow the state
with perpetual youth. But this harmony of Monarchy, Aristocracy,
and Democracy blended together, which was the ideal of many
writers, and which they supposed to be exhibited by Sparta,
by Carthage, and by Rome, was a chimera of philosophers never
realized by antiquity. At last, Tacitus, wiser than the rest,
confessed that the mixed constitution, however admirable
in theory, was difficult to establish and impossible to maintain.
His disheartening avowal is not disowned by later experience.
The experiment has been tried more often
than I can tell, with a combination of resources that were
unknown to the
ancients—with Christianity, parliamentary government,
and a free press. Yet there is no example of such a balanced
constitution having lasted a century. If it has succeeded
anywhere it has been in our favoured country and in our time:
and we know not yet how long the wisdom of the nation will
preserve the equipoise. The Federal check was as familiar
to the ancients as the Constitutional. For the type of all
their Republics was the government of a city by its own inhabitants
meeting in the public place. An administration embracing
many cities was known to them only in the form of the oppression
which Sparta exercised over the Messenians, Athens over her
Confederates, and Rome over Italy. The resources which in
modern times enabled a great people to govern itself through
a single centre did not exist. Equality could be preserved
only by Federalism; and it occurs more often amongst them
than in the modern world. If the distribution of power among
the several parts of the state is the most efficient restraint
on monarchy, the distribution of power among several states
is the best check on Democracy. By multiplying centres of
government and discussion, it promotes the diffusion of political
Knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent
opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities, and the consecration
of self-government. But although it must be enumerated among
the better achievements of practical genius in antiquity,
it arose from necessity, and its properties were imperfectly
investigated in theory.
When the Greeks began to reflect on the problems of society,
they first of all accepted things as they were, and did their
best to explain and to defend them. Enquiry which with us
is stimulated by doubt, began with them in wonder. The most
illustrious of the early philosophers, Pythagoras, promulgated
a theory for the preservation of political power in the educated
class, and ennobled a form of government which was generally
founded on popular ignorance, and on strong class interests.
He preached authority and subordination, and dwelt more on
duties than on rights, on Religion than on policy; and his
system perished in the revolution by which Oligarchies were
swept away. The Revolution afterwards developed its own philosophy,
whose excesses I have described.
But between the two eras, between the rigid didactics of
the early Pythagoreans and the dissolving theories of Protagoras,
a philosopher arose who stood aloof from both extremes, and
whose difficult sayings were never really understood or valued
until our time. Heraclitus, of Ephesus, deposited his book
in the temple of Diana. The book has perished, like the temple
and the worship; but its fragments have been collected and
interpreted with incredible ardour, by the scholars, the
divines, the philosophers and politicians who have been engaged
the most intensely in the toil and stress of this century.
The most renowned logician of the last generation adopted
every one of his propositions; and the most brilliant agitator
among continental Socialists, composed a work of 840 pages
to celebrate his memory.
Heraclitus complained that the masses were
deaf to truth, and knew not that one good man counts for
more than thousands;
but he held the existing order in no superstitious reverence.
Strife, he says, is the source and the master of all things.
Life is perpetual motion, and repose is death. No man can
plunge twice into the same current, for it is always flowing
and passing, and is never the same. The only thing fixed
and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign
Reason which all men may not perceive, but which is common
to all. Laws are sustained by no human authority, but by
virtue of their derivation from the one law that is divine.
These sayings, which recal[l] the grand outlines of political
truth which we have found in the Sacred Books, and carry
us forward to the latest teaching of our most enlightened
contemporaries, would bear a good deal of elucidation and
comment. Heraclitus is, unfortunately, so obscure that Socrates
could not understand him and I won’t pretend to have
succeeded better.
If the topic of my address was the history of political
science, the highest and the largest place would belong to
Plato and Aristotle. The Laws of the one, the Politics of
the other, are, if I may trust my own experience the books
from which we may learn the most about the principles of
politics. The penetration with which those great masters
of thought analyzed the institutions of Greece, and exposed
their vices, is not surpassed by anything in later literature;
by Burke or Hamilton, the best political writers of the last
century; by Tocqueville or Roscher, the most eminent of our
own. But Plato and Aristotle were philosophers, studious
not of unguided freedom, but of intelligent government. They
saw the disastrous effects of ill-directed striving for Liberty;
and they resolved that it was better not to strive for it,
but to be content with a strong administration, prudently
adapted to make men prosperous and happy.
Now Liberty and good government do not exclude each other;
and there are excellent reasons why they should go together;
but they do not necessarily go together. Liberty is not a
means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest
political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration
that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the
highest objects of civil society, and of private life. Increase
of freedom in the state may sometimes promote mediocrity,
and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful
legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict
the boundaries of Empire. It might be plausibly argued that,
if many things would be worse in England or Ireland under
an intelligent despotism, some things would be managed better;
that the Roman government was more enlightened under Augustus
and Antoninus than under the Senate, in the days of Marius
or of Pompey. A generous spirit prefers that his country
should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather
than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to
be the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the Alps, without
a prospect of influence beyond the narrow frontier, than
a subject of the superb autocracy that overshadows half of
Asia and of Europe. But it may be urged on the other side
that liberty is not the sum or the substitute of all the
things men ought to live for; that to be real it must be
circumscribed, and that the limits of circumscription vary;
that advancing civilization invests the state with increased
rights and duties and imposes increased burdens and constraint
on the subject; that a highly instructed and intelligent
community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations
which, at a lower stage would be thought unbearable; that
liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at
a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but
those of which it feels the advantage; that a free country
may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of
religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering,
than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies
by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration
of power; and that the supreme political object ought to
be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My
argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections.
We are dealing not with the effects of freedom, but with
its causes. We are seeking out the influences which brought
arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion
of power, or by the appeal to an authority that transcends
all government; and among those influences the greatest philosophers
of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.
It is the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation
to despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views
bridged the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian
state, and led the way to Freedom. Seeing how little security
there is that the laws of any land shall be wise or just,
and that the unanimous will of a people and the assent of
nations are liable to err, the Stoics looked beyond those
narrow barriers, and above those inferior sanctions for the
principles that ought to regulate the lives of men and the
existence of society. They made it known that there is a
will superior to the collective will of man, and a law that
overrules those of Solon and Lycurgus. Their test of good
government is its conformity to principles that can be traced
to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that to
which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to
sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which
is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from
His nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all
the nations.
The great question is, to discover not what governments
prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription
is valid against the conscience of mankind. Before God, there
is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor; and
the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men
are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth
which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and
children of God. The true guide of our conduct is no outward
authority, but the voice of God, who comes down to dwell
in our souls, who knows all our thoughts, to whom are owing
all the truth we know and all the good we do; for vice is
voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the heavenly
spirit within.
What the teaching of that divine voice is,
the philosophers who had imbibed the sublime ethics of
the Porch went on to
expound:—It is not enough to act up to the written
law, or to give all men their due; we ought to give them
more than their due, to be generous and beneficent, to devote
ourselves for the good of others, seeking our reward in self-denial
and sacrifice, acting from the motive of sympathy, and not
of personal advantage. Therefore we must treat others as
we wish to be treated by them, and must persist until death
in doing good to our enemies, regardless of unworthiness
and ingratitude. For we must be at war with evil, but at
peace with men, and it is better to suffer than to commit
injustice. True Freedom, says the most eloquent of the Stoics,
consists in obeying God. A state governed by such principles
as these would have been free far beyond the measure of Greek
or Roman freedom; for they open a door to religious toleration,
and close it against slavery. Neither conquest nor purchase,
said Zeno, can make one man the property of another.
These doctrines were adopted and applied
by the great jurists of the empire. The law of Nature,
they said, is superior
to the written law, and slavery contradicts the law of Nature.
Men have no right to do what they please with their own,
or to make profit out of another’s loss. Such is the
political wisdom of the ancients, touching the foundations
of Liberty, as we find it in its highest development, in
Cicero, and Seneca, and Philo, a Jew of Alexandria. Their
writings impress upon us the greatness of the work of preparation
for the Gospel which had been accomplished among men on the
eve of the mission of the Apostles. St. Augustine, after
quoting Seneca exclaims: “What more could a Christian
say than this pagan has said?” The enlightened pagans
had reached nearly the last point attainable without a new
dispensation, when the fullness of time was come. We have
seen the breadth and the splendour of the domain of Hellenic
thought, and it has brought us to the threshold of a greater
Kingdom. The best of the later classics speak almost the
language of Christianity, and they border on its spirit.
But in all that I have been able to cite from classical
literature, three things are wanting: Representative Government,
the emancipation of the slaves, and liberty of conscience.
There were, it is true, deliberative assemblies, chosen by
the people; and confederate cities, of which, both in Asia
and in Europe there were so many Leagues, sent their delegates,
to sit in federal councils. But government by an elected
parliament was, even in theory, a thing unknown. It is congruous
with the nature of Polytheism to admit some measure of toleration.
And Socrates, when he avowed that he must obey God rather
than the Athenians, and the Stoics, when they set the wise
man above the law, were very near giving utterance to the
principle. But it was first proclaimed, and established by
enactment, not in polytheistic and philosophical Greece,
but in India, by Asoka, the earliest of the Buddhist kings,
250 years before the Birth of Christ.
Slavery has been, far more than intolerance, the perpetual
curse and reproach of ancient civilization; and although
its rightfulness was disputed as early as the days of Aristotle,
and was implicitly if not definitely denied by several Stoics,
the moral philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, as well as
their practise, pronounced decidedly in its favour. But there
was one extraordinary people who, in this as in other things
anticipated the purer precept that was to come. Philo of
Alexandria is one of the writers whose views on society were
most advanced. He applauds not only liberty but equality
in the enjoyment of wealth. He believes that a limited democracy,
purged of its grosser elements, is the most perfect government,
and will extend itself gradually over all the world. By freedom
he understood the following of God. Philo, though he required
that the condition of the slave should be made compatible
with the wants and the claims of his higher nature, did not
absolutely condemn slavery. But he has put on record the
customs of the Essenes of Palestine, a people who, uniting
the wisdom of the Gentiles with the faith of the Jews led
lives which were uncontaminated by the surrounding civilization
and were the first to reject slavery both in principle and
practice. They formed a religious community rather than a
state, and their numbers did not exceed 4,000. But their
example testifies to how great a height religious men were
able to raise their conception of society even without the
succour of the New Testament, and affords the strongest condemnation
of their contemporaries.
This then is the conclusion to which our
survey brings us:—There
is hardly a truth in politics or in the system of the rights
of man, that was not grasped by the wisest of the Gentiles
and the Jews, or that they did not declare with a refinement
of thought and a nobleness of expression that later writers
could never surpass. I might go on for hours, reciting to
you passages on the law of Nature and the duties of man,
so solemn and religious, that though they come from the profane
theatre on the Acropolis, and from the Roman Forum, you would
deem that you were listening to the hymns of Christian Churches,
and the discourse of ordained divines. But although the maxims
of the great classic teachers, of Sophocles and Plato and
Seneca, and the glorious examples of public virtue were in
the mouths of all men, there was no power in them to avert
the doom of that civilization for which the blood of so many
patriots and the genius of such incomparable writers had
been wasted in vain. The liberties of the ancient nations
were crushed beneath a hopeless and inevitable despotism,
and their vitality was spent, when the new power came forth
from Galilee, giving what was wanting to the efficacy of
human knowledge, to redeem societies as well as men.
It would be presumptuous if I attempted to indicate the
numberless channels by which Christian influence gradually
penetrated the state. The first striking phenomenon is the
slowness with which an action destined to be so prodigious
became manifest. Going forth to all nations, in many stages
of civilization and under almost every form of government,
Christianity had none of the character of a political apostolate,
and in its absorbing mission to individuals, did not challenge
public authority. The early Christians avoided contact with
the state, abstained from the responsibilities of office,
and were even reluctant to serve in the army. Cherishing
their citizenship of a Kingdom not of this world, they despaired
of an empire which seemed too powerful to be resisted and
too corrupt to be converted, whose institutions, the work
and the pride of untold centuries of paganism, drew their
sanctions from the gods whom the Christians accounted devils,
which plunged its hands from age to age in the blood of martyrs,
and was beyond the hope of regeneration and foredoomed to
perish. They were so much overawed as to imagine that the
fall of the state would be the end of the Church and of the
world; and no man dreamed of the boundless future of spiritual
and social influence that awaited their Religion among the
race of destroyers that were bringing the empire of Augustus
and of Constantine to humiliation and ruin. The duties of
government were less in their thoughts than the private virtues
and duties of subjects; and it was long before they became
aware of the burden of power in their faith. Down almost
to the time of Chrysostom, they shrank from contemplating
the obligation to emancipate the slaves.
Although the doctrine of selfreliance and selfdenial which
is the foundation of political economy, was written as legibly
in the New Testament as in the Wealth of Nations, it was
not recognized until our age. Tertullian boasts of the passive
obedience of the Christians. Melito writes to a pagan emperor
as if he were incapable of giving an unjust command; and
in Christian times, Optatus thought that whoever presumed
to find fault with his sovereign, exalted himself almost
to the level of a god. But this political quietism was not
universal. Origen, the ablest writer of early times, spoke
with approval of conspiring for the destruction of tyranny.
After the fourth century the declarations
against slavery are earnest and continual. And in a theological
but yet pregnant
sense divines of the second century insist on Liberty, and
divines of the fourth century on equality. There was one
essential and inevitable transformation in politics. Popular
governments had existed, and also mixed, and federal governments,
but there had been no limited government, no state the circumference
of whose authority had been defined by a force external to
its own. That was the great problem which philosophy had
raised, and which no statesmanship had been able to solve.
Those who proclaimed the existence of a higher authority
had indeed drawn a metaphysical barrier before the governments,
but they had not known how to make it real. All that Socrates
could effect by way of protest against the tyranny of the
reformed Democracy was to die for his convictions. The Stoics
could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics,
keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: “Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto
God the things that are God’s,” those words,
spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before
His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection
of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds
it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation
of absolutism and the inauguration of Freedom. For our Lord
not only delivered the precept, but created the force to
execute it. To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme
sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined
limits, ceased to be an aspiration of patient reasoners,
and was made the perpetual charge and care of the most energetic
institution and the most universal association in the world.
The new law, the new spirit, the new authority, gave to Liberty
a meaning and a value it had not possessed in the philosophy
or in the constitution of Greece or Rome, before the knowledge
of the Truth that makes us free.