Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/222

210 of the law, the law is usually no longer necessary. In other words, voluntary consent is the essential condition of all stable social arrangements, instead of governmental coercion.

It may be objected that the social philosopher is compelled to recognize that, under the law of relativity, arbitrary and paternal forms of government have had and still have their proper place in the order of societary evolution. They are adapted to certain phases of culture and civilization, wherein order could not be maintained under freer and more democratic governmental institutions. This is true; but such forms of government are always temporary and unstable, where the conditions of social progress are steadily operative. As populations attain to a higher degree of intelligence and culture, a larger freedom is demanded; and no arbitrary government can long resist this popular demand. The result of such resistance, when it is attempted, if not revolution, is stagnation, atrophy, and arrested development.

This principle of voluntary consent is well illustrated in the earliest and most primitive type of societary development the family. The family is based upon the marriage relation; and while, in the savage and barbarous stages of human evolution, we have marriage by capture and the exercise of various modes of coercion sanctioned by custom and authority, it is universally admitted in all highly civilized communities that true marriage rests upon the uncoerced consent of both contracting parties. As this consent is less a matter of mere formality and becomes more perfect and complete, involving the recognition of attractions not only emotional and physical, but also intellectual, moral, and spiritual, so is the union more permanent and satisfying.

The principle herein laid down holds good in every stage of social combination, however complex and widely extended it may be. It is a sound political philosophy which is enunciated in that paragraph of our Declaration of Independence which affirms that all just powers of government rest upon the consent of the governed. This is as true of the older autocratic and monarchical systems as it is of our own democratic-republican form of government. An autocracy which finds no response in the hearts of the people, but is maintained solely by the iron rule of external compulsion, is a tyranny, unstable in its foundations, unadapted to its societary environment, and destined to early destruction, either by peaceful evolutionary measures or by forceful revolution. In such a state, nihilism and anarchism are natural products of the existing social conditions. The pent-up forces of an artificially restrained individualism must somehow find vent, even if it be by means of revolutionary violence. Russia to-day offers an instructive example of the truth of this principle.