THE

VI

THE HANDIWORK OF THE STATE

"O masters, lords, and rulers of all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God?"

HE handiwork of the State depends on the idea of the State which the citizens hold as their ideal of citizenship. If the office of the State is minimized it cannot produce much of a man, and has little part in producing any sort of man that grows up amid its laws.

If the State is supposed to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, and the governed be not an organic people with one will, which the government itself impersonates, but a number of separate persons with private wills that must privately and separately permit civil authority, then there is not a just government or rightful State on earth. No man consents to be born under family government and live under it half, if not all, his lifetime. No woman ever consented to become female and waive all male prerogatives. The American colonies did not adjourn after the Declaration of Independence until their subjects consented that they might go on with their magistrates and sheriffs and tax collectors and common law. This generation has never been waited on with a petition for

approval of proceedings begun before its birth, and carried on as if it were yet unborn. At least, I, for one, have not seen such a petition.

And yet if no government be just without consent; if past governments, domestic and civil, were unjust for lack of it; and if all other governments than the American are, through lack of it, still unjust; and if America must obtain it in order that a justice which never existed before and exists nowhere else may exist at all on earth; there should be no doubt in the mind of the Race, which has only this one ethicopolitical hope, and this one ground of faith in a just God, that American consent is free, explicit, unintimidated, individual by individual, generation after generation. Majorities have no right to speak for minorities who have never consented to be ruled by majorities. Right of social contract! Who gave the contractors the right to make a contract binding on all men? A majority prior to the contract! Who gave the pre-social majority a right to decide that Society should for ever abide by its decision? Is despotism any less despotic because it has a million heads instead of one? According to Thomas Jefferson, one generation cannot bind another which has yet to be born, to pay national debts.

Again the State cannot be just by any maxim of equality. Men are not equal in rights any more than in limbs or fortunes. They are not, and ought not to be, equal behind or before the law. They cannot go to West Point equally, nor pass equal examinations for civil service, nor pay equal taxes, nor stand with equal certainty before criminal courts.

Fisher Ames pricked this world-big bubble with

his aphorism, "All men have not an equal right to all things, but whatever right they have is as much to be protected and provided for as other men's rights." Equality before the law means simply that law is law, and men are men. Law is equal inasmuch as its distinctions act uniformly. Men are equal in the identity of their manhood, through all social and personal distinctions.

The fact is, that in proportion as men are equal they are unfree, and therefore not truly men. Ranks are more equally flat under a tyrant's absolute sway than when they are free to rise according to their unequal abilities. There may be an equality of degradation and dead sameness, but not of freedom, which is either free to develop and create the distinctions of development, or mere fife-wind to play Yankee Doodle with.

Furthermore, if it be imagined that man started his career with an outfit of natural rights, and that government is a mere expedient or compromise which these rights have agreed on for self-protection, so that they have to watch it with suspicion and set up safeguards against its enactments, and play hide and seek with its laws, and continually assert their independence and inalienability, as though law could but oppress, and freedom consisted in lawlessnessif this be the theory of the State, then the State is at best a choice of evils, and, being an evil, can but work evil in its citizens, and most in those who have most to do with its infernal work. Why should not the evil thing, of which evil only is expected, work iniquity whenever and wherever it can? Why should it not make a plague of politics? Why should it

even respect inalienable rights, if by any hook or crook of simulated justice it can catch and fetter and strangle them? Inalienable right to life! There it swings on the gallows. Inalienable right to liberty! Yonder it lock-steps along in a chain-gang. Inalienable right to pursue happiness! Let its drunken pursuit find its own felicity in a prison cell by sobering up from last night's riotous debauch! Inalienable, yet alienated by crime which the State itself defines! Inalienable fudge if the State is to be believed! But can such a State be believed? Is not the State wrong and the crime right? And is not the criminal, nature's hero and saint?

Now, as there is not and never was, and never will be a State that impersonates such ideas, though they be written all over its parchment-constitution, the State must be judged in its reality and by the ideal which it realizes. For the living constitution of a State is the spirit of its people, whose unwritten laws are mightier than any statutes which try to copy them, but often fail.

There is such a spirit, and it is real as ever informed the body of man. Aside from all other signs of it, language alone evidences its reality. Language is its voice-that one speech by which all citizens speak one and the same communicative mind. Tribes have dialects; only nations have languages. Before the birth of a German spirit there was no German language; village words sufficed for village gossip. But when Luther's controversy came, the idiom that carried it on melted in the heat of it, and took the mould of a nation's thought. Every notion, fancy, fashion, whim, desire, hope, discovery,

invention, sentiment, passion, task, and play of a people, all its wit, humor, pathos, and conscience pass into words, and these have characteristic utterance and record. Language lives the nation's whole life. When the language ceases to throb with fresh and picturesque and poetic words, the national life ails. Dead languages can only write the epitaphs of dead peoples. Living languages are confessions of national character. Frivolity is Frenchy; commandingness speaks with the accent of a Shakespeare and a Burke.

And more, every new-born generation enters a matrix that will shape the features of its thought

-a matrix of nursery rhymes and folk-lore, of literature that prattles, and philosophy that has learned to lisp, and history that sings infant lays, so that when the child becomes a man he may be as distinctly an American, say, as he is his mother's

son.

American character is all inwrought with his own. He thinks, feels, wills, America. America is the soul of his soul. Blood is thicker than water: language is thicker than blood. By blood men are kin; by language they marry, and beget kinship itself.

Now this spirit is more than the life of a social organism. Apt as is the analogy of organism, it is only an analogy, and misspells the secret of national character. A corrective of the clumsy mechanical theories which put the State outside its citizens, and in a certain opposition to them, it still cannot express that unity of the State with its citizens, which grows more close as they grow more independent, more authoritative as they grow more free. No more outside its citizens than the body is outside its