Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/322

302 order of nature. It is not positive and objective; therefore it is not capable of constant and easy verification. It is historical and institutional. That means, however, that it is in the flux and change of civilization, wherefore the reason and conscience of men are kept in constant activity to re-examine accepted principles, and to reach new and more correct solution of problems. On account of this activity, institutions are modified constantly, and the concrete contents of the public creed, about rights and duties, are undergoing constant change. It does not appear that this ever can be otherwise. There is an assumption that we can attain to social stability by finding out the right "form of government," or the correct "social system," but no ground for such a notion can be found in philosophy or history. The equilibrium of rights and duties constitutes the terms on which the struggle for existence is carried on in a given society, after the reason and conscience of the community have pronounced judgment on those terms. The very highest conception of the state is that it is an organization for bringing that judgment to an expression in the Constitution and laws. A state, therefore, is good, bad, or indifferent, according to the directness and correctness with which it brings to an expression the best reason and conscience of the people, and embodies their judgment in institutions and laws. The state, therefore, lives by deliberation and discussion, and by tacit or overt expressions of the major opinion.

The fact that laws and institutions must be constantly remolded, in the progress of time, by the active reason and conscience of the people, is what has probably given rise to the notion, just now so popular, that ethical considerations do, or ought to, regulate legislation and social relations. The doctrine, however, that institutions must, in the course of generations, slowly change to conform to social conditions and social forces, according to the mature convictions of great masses of men, is a very different thing from the notion that rights and duties should be at the sport of all the crude notions which, from time to time, may gain the assent of even an important group of the population.

Among the most important tides of thought at the present time which are hostile to liberty are socialism, which always has to assume a controlling organ to overrule personal liberty and set aside civil liberty, in order to bring about what the socialist authorities have decided shall be done; nationalism, really a cognate of socialism, with opposition to emigration or immigration; state