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activity, keeps the right mean between democratic anarchy and centralised autocracy. What this organisation of Nature has least affinity with, is the constitutional system with its parliamentary machinery and the ideal brutality of its government by majorities. However, it would perhaps be hazardous to reproach Nature that it also has not followed this doctrinaire model, which, until quite recently, passed pretty generally as the ideal of political organisation. It were rather worth considering whether, conversely, our modern political wisdom might not derive a stimulus to fresh revision of its doctrines from the study of the arrangement of the natural organism."*

The

Yes. This is truly worth considering. study of the arrangement of the natural organism may teach valuable lessons as to the arrangement of the political organism. But there is one thing which it cannot teach: one thing needful before all others and that is the doctrine of Right, which is the only true foundation of the public order. Where shall we seek that doctrine? I answer, in the moral law. The very same ethical law which reigns over the individual reigns over the aggregation of individuals in civil society. And its dictates are truths of supreme authority which no gainsaying of the largest and loudest multitude can, in the least, invalidate. It is the fundamental fact, not only of individual life, but of the social order. It is the supreme rule alike of private and public existence: the sun of righteousness illuminating the world of

* Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. iii. p. 274. I avail myself of Mr. Coupland's translation.

VI.] THE TRUE BASIS OF THE SOCIAL ORDER. 195

rational being; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. For the great thinkers of the ancient world all duties-officia-were included in ethics: jurisprudence was a part of moral philosophy. The masters of the medieval school judged likewise. It is from the time of the Renaissance that we may trace the de-ethicising of public life. Our modern utilitarianism is the logical outcome of its antinomianism. Kant has again pointed the world to a more excellent way. For him the State is essentially an ethical society, rooted and grounded in the moral law, of which he finely says that should it cease, all worth of human life on earth would cease too. The very foundation of the public order, as he judges, is the rational acknowledgment that there are eternal immutable principles and rules of right and wrong. This is the everlasting adamant upon which alone the social edifice can be surely established. Rear it upon any other basis, and you do but build upon sand. However fair the structure may seem, fall it must, and great will be the fall of it. To talk of the rights of the isolated individual, abstracted from the moral law, is an absurdity. Such an individual does not exist; and if he did exist, he could have no rights, for right is the correlative of duty. What I claim as my right, due to me, I first feel as my duty, due from me: an obligation laid upon me by One who is higher than I. Hence every vindication of a right means the riveting of a duty. Every increase of liberty, which is an

increase of right, requires an increase of ethical discipline. But where in an age, rent by religious divisions and stunned by conflicting philosophies, where shall men seek the oracle of that moral law? The wise of all ages are at one in their response. "Lo, the shrine is in thy own heart." "The true Shekinah is man." "The kingdom of God is within you." Under the law of that kingdom we are born: "Thou oughtest and thou canst." Destroy all creeds and all philosophies, and still in the Categorical Imperative of duty there is left the supreme rule, as of religion and of ethics, so of the political order. Make of conscience, with the false prophets of the new gospel, but the crystallised experience of the past, or but a bundle of solar rays stored up in the brain, and, with religion and ethics, liberty, which is the expression of personality, perishes too. For the autonomous person has disappeared. In his place you have merely the most highly developed of mammals, which you may class as biped, bimanous, and so forth, and of which that is the whole account: a primat among the other animals, and as incapable as the rest of rational freedom.

CHAPTER VII.

THE REVOLUTION AND ENGLAND.

"CONTENIR et régler la démocratie sans l'avilir, l'organiser en monarchie tempérée, ou en république conservatrice, tel est le problème de notre siècle." * So wrote Montalembert in 1856. He confidently hoped that in England, if anywhere, this problem would be solved. The past career of our country offered warrants for his confidence. The history of the English people for a thousand years as I have drawn out at some length in the first chapter of this work has been the history of the political enfranchisement of classes, as they have become competent to share in the control of public affairs. The present century has witnessed that enfranchisement on the largest scale. Certainly the net result has been to bring our institutions into harmony with the democratic movement which is the capital social fact of the age.

De l'Avenir Politique de l'Angleterre, 4me édition, p. 38.

That all the changes, whereby this result has been attained, have been sagaciously planned or judiciously executed, will probably be asserted by no one possessed of even an elementary knowledge --such knowledge is not so commonly diffused as could be desired-of the primordial principles of political philosophy. In the extremely peculiar system of party government which prevails among us-the accident of an accident, curiously glorified by newspaper publicists and after-dinner orators, as the perfection of political wisdom-sagacity and judgment are chiefly directed to the acquisition and retention of office. M. Louis Blanc has put it not amiss. "Petites conceptions, petites manœuvres, petites habiletés, petites intrigues, voilà de quoi se compose l'art de conquérir une majorité dans une assemblée qui dure longtemps. On y arrive a ne plus tenir compte que de ce qu'on a devant soi, autour de soi, et le pays est oublié." And to the same effect a very different authority, the late Professor Green, writes: "The question of what really needs to be enacted by the State in order to secure the conditions under which a good life is possible, is lost sight of in the quest for majorities, and as the will of the people, in every other sense than the measure of what the people will tolerate, is really unascertainable in the great nations of Europe, the way is prepared for the sophistries of modern political management, for manipulating electoral bodies, for influencing

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