Page:Uncivil Liberty.djvu/3

 independence of British American Colonies, asserted in 1776, was an emphatic declaration of the right of peoples to manage their own affairs; an appeal from governments to justice, from men to man. Till then nations were subject to enthroned power, whose will was superior to popular dissent. Singularly enough the managers of that revolution, after affirming life and liberty to be inalienable rights, proceeded to destroy life by wholesale in battle, and were so insincere as to deny liberty to a weaker race. The same hands which slew tyrants on Bunker Hill spread the shield of Federal law over chattel bondage at the South, and the Union of '89 became "a herd of States hunting slaves." Retributive justice has emancipated and enfranchised black men, but the insincerity of the fathers reappears in the dogma of exclusive male sovereignty, which rules one-half our adult citizens—the women—against their consent. This rude resistance to the logic of events affronts the essential principles of liberty, which inspired what self-government is yet thought safe in private affairs, and were designed to secure, at least, good manners in rulers.

Human government originated in force; in the heaviest fist, or with those able to control the mere animal strength of the hour; the exponent of concrete opinion, of what certain men think best to be done, with a large infusion of fraud and violence, it now appears as emperor, president, or pound-keeper, set over prone multitudes, until they get on two feet and acknowledge the domination of principles. Through John Baptist or Herod, Brutus or Cæsar, Cromwell or Stuart, Lincoln or Buchanan, the moral sense, often stifled or perverted, but never conquered, here and there gets into creed, deed, or positive law, and makes the epoch memorable. One evolves a truth and is reviled, starved, or murdered outright for it; the truth survives, overrules law and custom, and men grow famous in eulogizing what they killed the discoverer for announcing. The king's arm being too short to reach the circumference of his realm, he delegates his will to subordinate executors, on whom, in turn, he is somewhat dependent. Thus all governments, in their way, are representative, and rest on consent, though they differ in the width of the circle