Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/678

658 a capacity unparalleled since the advent of man to solve "the problems of life" without other impulse than their love of toil and devotion to improvement. But, with the outbreak of the civil war, a new political and social philosophy became the vogue. It was the product of the conditions that always spring from desperate conflicts. Men of action, coping with insurrection, had no taste for the refinements of political speculation, and no use for the limitations of a Constitution. Nothing was of importance to them except the measures that would save the Union. Even freedom, private interests, and cherished institutions had to yield to the exigencies of the hour. Hamilton had feared that "the States, with every power in their hands, will make encroachments upon the national authority till the Union is weakened and dissolved"; but under the terrific stress of war the Federal Government became omnipotent, threatening to reduce them to administrative departments. Whatever power was thought necessary to raise troops, or to provide revenue, or to crush opposition, was intrusted to it or arrogated by it. No matter how violative of moral or economic law, every act was defended, first, on the ground of necessity, and, later, on the ground of wisdom. When the war was over, the Federal Government, which had performed such miracles, had not simply become all-powerful; it had become all-wise. There was no work it was not thought fitted to do.

When account is taken of the resistless influence of war upon thought and institutions, the revolution wrought in the theory and practice of government in the United States within the past thirty years does not belong to the domain of mystery. It is not to be classed as an inscrutable decree of Providence, designed to hasten the work of civilization. This enlargement of the sphere of government and the loss of freedom it involves have a less cheerful significance. Thy mean that a nation has suffered from the ravages of conflict. Instead, therefore, of welcoming the change as a beneficent "tendency of the times," to use the current phrase, it should be resisted as an onslaught of the forces of barbarism.

To be sure, the founders of the republic had not worked out with Mr. Spencer's precision a theory of government. Science had not put them in possession of the knowledge that has enabled him to define the limits of public authority. Yet in their denunciations of British despotism and in the Bills of Rights with which they prefaced their Constitutions, they set forth principles quite as hostile as those of his Justice to the state socialism now current. Neither did they apply with his rigor of logic the principles of freedom they did proclaim. Widely, at times, did they depart, as I have said, from