Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/848

766 the civil authority is chiefly known to the individual citizen as the protector of his rights, not as the director of his actions. This is the case in Great Britain to a remarkable extent. Authority there puts on no airs; it has duties to perform, and demands respect for itself in the performance of them; but it does not pretend to occupy a position of superiority over the people at large. What it does it does in their interest and by their warrant, and the only feeling, therefore, which a magistrate or other officer of the law has in that country is that he is co-operating with others for the general weal. In the courts lawyers may sometimes try to browbeat witnesses; but lawyers are not invested with authority, and the appeal of the witness in that case lies to the judge, who, as a rule, will not allow that kind of thing to go too far. In Victor Hugo's Miserables there is an interview between a young man of good social position (Marius) and a subordinate police officer, whose assistance the former has been obliged to invoke against a band of criminals. The petty potentate questions the young man very brusquely, and, finding him quite self-possessed and free from fear, compliments him in the following terms: "You speak like a brave and honest man. Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not dread authority." An Englishman would have felt like knocking the fellow down for his impertinence and taking all risks. The preposterous idea that a citizen seeking the assistance of a functionary in a matter which the functionary is paid for attending to, should stand in any dread of him! But in countries infected with the military spirit civil authority can hardly help putting on the airs of absolute power.

The history of England may, however, be appealed to in support of the principle that individual liberty waxes and wanes according to the greater or less predominance of militarism. Wars conducted abroad, though they have an important reactive effect at home, do not affect domestic administration as wars carried on within the nation itself. The Norman conquest secured for England, if we except the struggles which occurred after the death of Henry I, a long period of comparative internal peace, toward the close of which parliamentary institutions began to take form and substance. Then followed the Wars of the Roses, which led to a decided increase in monarchical absolutism. But again peace came to the help of liberty; and, in the words of Bagehot which Mr. Spencer quotes, "the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I, and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I." For over a century after the Commonwealth, liberty and social order continued to gain ground; but again came a period of reaction brought on by the incessant wars waged by England between 1775 and 1815. So severely were the resources of the nation