V. Who's to Blame?

 ( Addressed to the Editor of THE CATHOLIC STANDARD. By Catholicus .) Letter 1. The British Constitution on its Trial

 SIR, I have been much shocked, as I suppose has been the case with most of your readers, at the weekly extracts you have made from the correspondents of the daily prints, descriptive of the state of the British army in the Crimea; and a conviction has been steadily growing, or rather has been formed, in my mind, which the running comments of the Press continually strengthen, that we must go very deep indeed to get at the root of the evil, which lies, not in the men in authority, nor in systems of administration simply in themselves, but in nothing short of the British Constitution itself. I do not expect I shall get others to agree with me in this conclusion at once; I do not ask you, Mr. Editor, to assent to it, but to be patient with me, if in order to do justice to my own ideas on the subject, I ask for a long hearing if I even ask to be diffuse, roundabout, discursive, nay, perhaps, prosy, in support of what, at first sight, readers may call my paradox, for I have no chance of establishing it in any other way.

 Nor have I embraced it with any satisfaction to my feelings, certainly not to my Catholic feelings. Indeed, I have a decided view that Catholicism is safer and more free under a Constitutional regime, such as our own, than under any other. I have no wish for "reforms"; and should be sorry to create in the minds of your readers any sentiment favourable either to democracy or to absolutism. I have no liking for the tyranny whether of autocrat or mob; no taste for being whirled off to Siberia, or tarred and feathered in the far West, by the enemies of my religion. May I live and die under the mild sway of a polity which certainly represses and dilutes the blind fanaticism of a certain portion of my countrymen, a fanaticism which, except for it, would sweep us off these broad lands, and lodge us, with little delay or compunction, in the German Sea! Still, we cannot alter facts; and, if the British Constitution is admirably adapted for peace, but not for war, which is the proposition I shall support, and which seems dawning on the public mind, there is a lesson contained in that circumstance which demands our attention. The lesson is this that we were not wise to go to war, if we could possibly have avoided it, at a time when, by a lucky accident, the Duke of Wellington had gained for the nation a military prestige which it had little chance of preserving; and the sooner we know our capabilities and our true mission among the nations of the earth, and get back into a state of peace, in which we are really and truly great, the better for us.

 It is not that I am doubting the heroic bravery and fortitude of the British soldier. I am not speaking of the individual soldier, whose great qualities I revere and marvel at, and whom I have been following with my anxieties and prayers ever since he set out on his foreign campaign. I am as little concerned here with the valour of our soldiers, as with the bigotry of our middle class; with the heights of Inkerman, as with the depths of Exeter Hall. I am to speak of our Constitution and of Constitutional Government; and I say that this said Constitutional Government of ours shows to extreme advantage in a state of peace, but not so in a state of war; and that it cannot be otherwise from the nature of things. Surely it is not paradoxical to say as much as this; for no one in this world can secure all things at once, but in every human work there is a maximum of good, short of the best possible. The wonder and the paradox rather would be, if the institutions of England were equally admirable for all contingencies, for war as well as for peace. Certainly martial law and constitutional freedom, the soldier's bayonet and the staff of the policeman, belong to antagonistic classes of ideas, and are not likely to co-operate happily with each other.

 Nor, again, do I therefore say that we must never go to war, or that we shall always get the worst off, if we do. I only mean, it is not our strong point. I suppose, if we had no fowling-pieces, we might still manage, like Philoctetes, to knock off our game with bow and arrows. There are always ways of doing things, where there is the will. I am not denying that, with great exertion, we are able to hoist up our complex Constitution, to ease it into position, and fire it off with uncommon effect; but to do so is a most inconvenient, expensive, tedious process; it takes much time, much money, many men, and many lives. We ought in consequence to think twice before we set it to work for a purpose for which it was never made; and this I think we did not do a year ago. We hardly thought once about the matter. With intense self-conceit, we despised our foe. We treated him as we treated the Pope four years before, and we have caught it. The Times put out feelers, this time last year, as to the possibility of the British Lion being persuaded into a more good-humoured, as well as a more prudent course; but that sagacious journal was soon obliged to draw them in again, and to swim down the stream with the boldest. For the said Lion was bent on puffing the Muscovite into space with the mere breath of his growl; and it did not occur to him at the moment, that perhaps it was his own wisdom, and not the Muscovite's merely, to let well alone, and to live upon the capital which a great military genius had made for him in the last war. And so, without reflection, the Lion did what, I am firmly persuaded, neither the Duke nor Sir Robert Peel would have let him do, had they been alive. He believed those counsellors who had the madness to tell him that it was a little war which he was beginning, and he stood rampant forthwith both in the Baltic and in the Black Sea.

 But there is a further view of the matter, and it suggests another unpleasant consideration. No one likes to use a cumbrous, clumsy instrument; and, if at war we are, and with institutions not fitted for war, it is just possible we may alter our institutions, under the immediate pressure, in order to make them work easier for the object of war; and then what becomes of King, Lords, and Commons? There are abundant symptoms, on all sides of us, of the presence of a strong temptation to some such temerarious proceeding. Any one, then, who, like myself, is thankful that he is born under the British Constitution, any Catholic who dreads the knout and the tar-barrel, will, for that very reason, look with great jealousy on a state of things which not only doubles prices and taxes, but which may bring about a sudden infringement and an irreparable injury of that remarkable polity, which the world never saw before, or elsewhere, and which it is so pleasant to live under. I do not mean to say that anything serious will be sensibly experienced in our time, at least in the time of those who are gliding rapidly along to the evening of life; but it would be no consolation to me to be told that the Constitution will last my day, if I know that the next generation, whom I am watching as they come into active life, would fall under a form of government less favourable to the Church. And I do not think that the Catholics of England, who have shown no little exultation at the war, would gain much by rescuing Turkey from the Russo-Greeks, if, after planting Protestant Liberalism there instead, they found on looking homeward that despotism or democracy had mounted in these islands on the ruins of the aristocracy.

 However, it is not my business to prophesy, but to attempt to lay down principles, which I hope to be allowed to do in my next letter.

 Letter 2. States and Constitutions

 THE proposition I have undertaken to maintain is this: That the British Constitution is made for a state of peace, and not for a state of war; and that war tries it in the same way, to use a homely illustration, that it tries a spoon to use it for a knife, or a scythe or hay-fork to make it do the work of a spade. I expressed myself thus generally, in order to give to those who should do me the honour of reading me the most expeditious insight into the view which I wished to set before them. But, if I must speak accurately, my meaning is this, that, whereas a Nation has two aspects, internal and external, one as regards its own members, and one as regards foreigners, and whereas its government has two duties, one towards its subjects, and one towards its allies or enemies, the British State is great in its home department, which is its primary object, foreign affairs being its secondary; while France or Russia, Prussia or Austria, contemplates in the first place foreign affairs, and is great in their management, and makes the home department only its second object. And further, that, if England be great abroad, as she is, it is not so much the State, as the People or Nation, which is the cause of her greatness, and that not by means but in spite of the Constitution, or, if by means of it in any measure, clumsily so and circuitously; on the other hand, that, if foreign powers are ever great in the management of their own people, and make men of them, this they do in spite of their polity, and rather by the accidental qualifications of the individual ruler; or if by their polity, still with inconvenience and effort. Other explanations I may add to the above as I proceed, but this is sufficient for the present.

 Now I hope you will have patience with me, if I begin by setting down what I mean by a State, and by a Constitution.

 First of all, it is plain that every one has a power of his own to act this way or that, as he pleases. And, as not one or two, but every one has it, it is equally plain, that, if all exercised it to the full, at least the stronger part of mankind would always be in conflict with each other, and no one would enjoy the benefit of it; so that it is the interest of every one to give up some portion of his birth-freedom in this or that direction, in order to secure more freedom on the whole; exchanging a freedom which is now large and now narrow, according as the accidents of his conflicts with others are more or less favourable to himself, for a certain definite range of freedom prescribed and guaranteed by settled engagements or laws. In other words, Society is necessary for the well-being of human nature. The result, aimed at and effected by these mutual arrangements, is called a State or Standing; that is, in contrast with the appearance presented by a people before and apart from such arrangements, which is not a standing, but a chronic condition of commotion and disorder.

 And next, as this State or settlement of a people, is brought about by mutual arrangements, that is, by laws or rules, there is need, from the nature of the case, of some power over and above the People itself to maintain and enforce them. This living guardian of the laws is called the Government, and a governing power is thus involved in the very notion of Society. Let the Government be suspended, and at once the State is threatened with dissolution, which at best is only a matter of time.

 A lively illustration in point is furnished us by a classical historian. When the great Assyrian Empire broke up, a time of anarchy succeeded; and, little as its late subjects liked its sway, they liked its absence less. The historian thus proceeds: "There was a wise man among the Medes, called Deioces. This Deioces, aspiring to be tyrant, did thus. He was already a man of reputation in his own country, and he now, more than ever, practised justice. The Medes, accordingly, in his neighbourhood, seeing his ways, made him their umpire in disputes. He, on the other hand, having empire in his eye, was upright and just. As he proceeded thus, the dwellers in other towns, who had suffered from unjust decisions, were glad to go to him and to plead their causes, till at length they went to no one else. Deioces now had the matter in his own hands. Accordingly he would no longer proceed to the judgment-seat; for it was not worth his while, he said, to neglect his private affairs for the sake of the affairs of others. When rapine and lawlessness returned, his friends said, 'We must appoint a king over us;' and then they debated who it should be, and Deioces was praised by every one. So they made him their king; and he, upon this, bade them to build him a house worthy of his kingly power, and protect him with guards; and the Medes did so."

 Now I have quoted this passage from history, because it carries us a step further in our investigation. It is for the good of the many that the one man, Deioces, is set up; but who is to keep him in his proper work? He puts down all little tyrants, but what is to hinder his becoming a greater tyrant than them all? This was actually the case; first the Assyrian tyranny, then anarchy, then the tyranny of Deioces. Thus the unfortunate masses oscillate between two opposite evils, that of having no governor, and that of having too much of one; and which is the lesser of the two? This was the dilemma which beset the Horse in the fable. He was in feud with the Stag, by whose horns he was driven from his pasture. The Man promised him an easy victory, if he would let him mount him. On his assenting, the Man bridled him, and vaulted on him, and pursued and killed his enemy; but, this done, he would not get off him. Now, then, the Horse was even worse off than before, because he had a master to serve, instead of a foe to combat.

 Here then is the problem: the social state is necessary for man, but it seems to contain in itself the elements of its own undoing. It requires a power to enforce the laws, and to rule the unruly; but what law is to control that power, and to rule the ruler? According to the common adage, "Quis custodiat ipsos custodes?" Who is to hinder the governor dispensing with the law in his own favour? History shows us that this problem is as ordinary as it is perplexing.

 The expedient, by which the State is kept in statu and its ruler is ruled, is called its Constitution; and this has next to be explained. Now a Constitution really is not a mere code of laws, as is plain at once; for the very problem is how to confine power within the law, and in order to the maintenance of law. The ruling power can, and may, overturn law and law-makers, as Cromwell did, by the same sword with which he protects them. Acts of Parliament, Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Reform Bill, none of these are the British Constitution. What then is conveyed in that word? I would answer as follows:

 As individuals have characters of their own, so have races. Most men have their strong and their weak points, and points neither good nor bad, but idiosyncratic. And so of races: one is brave and sensitive of its honour; another romantic; another industrious, or long-headed, or religious. One is barbarous, another civilized. Moreover, growing out of these varieties or idiosyncrasies, and corresponding to them, will be found in these several races, and proper to each, a certain assemblage of beliefs, convictions, rules, usages, traditions, proverbs, and principles; some political, some social, some moral; and these tending to some definite form of government and modus vivendi, or polity, as their natural scope. And this being the case, when a given race has that polity which is intended for it by nature, it is in the same state of repose and contentment which an individual enjoys who has the food, or the comforts, the stimulants, sedatives, or restoratives, which are suited to his diathesis and his need. This then is the Constitution of a State: securing, as it does, the national unity by at once strengthening and controlling its governing power. It is something more than law; it is the embodiment of special ideas, ideas perhaps which have been held by a race for ages, which are of immemorial usage, which have fixed themselves in its innermost heart, which are in its eyes sacred to it, and have practically the force of eternal truths, whether they be such or not. These ideas are sometimes trivial, and, at first sight, even absurd: sometimes they are superstitious, sometimes they are great or beautiful; but to those to whom they belong they are first principles, watchwords, common property, natural ties, a cause to fight for, an occasion of self-sacrifice. They are the expressions of some or other sentiment, of loyalty, of order, of duty, of honour, of faith, of justice, of glory. They are the creative and conservative influences of Society; they erect nations into States, and invest States with Constitutions. They inspire and sway, as well as restrain, the ruler of a people, for he himself is but one of that people to which they belong.

 3. Constitutional Principles and their Varieties

 IT is a common saying that political power is founded on opinion; this is true, if the word "opinion" be understood in the widest sense of which it is capable. A State depends and rests, not simply on force of arms, not on logic, not on anything short of the sentiment and will of those who are governed. This doctrine does not imply instability and change as inherent characteristics of a body politic. Since no one can put off his opinions in a moment, or by willing it, since those opinions may be instincts, principles, beliefs, convictions, since they may be self-evident, since they may be religious truths, it may be easily understood how a national polity, as being the creation and development of a multitude of men having all the same opinions, may stand of itself, and be most firmly established, and may be practically secure against reverse. And thus it is that countries become settled, with a definite form of social union, and an ascendancy of law and order; not as if that particular settlement, union, form, order, and law were self-sanctioned and self-supported, but because it is founded in the national mind, and maintained by the force of a living tradition. This, then, is what I mean by a State; and, being the production and outcome of a people, it is necessarily for the good of the people, and it has two main elements, power and liberty, for without power there is no protection, and without liberty there is nothing to protect. The seat of power is the Government; the seat of liberty is the Constitution.

 You will say that this implies that every State must have a Constitution; so I think it has, in the sense in which I have explained the word. As the governing power may be feeble and unready, so the check upon its arbitrary exercise may be partial and uncertain; it may be rude, circuitous, abrupt, or violent; it need not be scientifically recognized and defined; but there never has been, there never can be, in any political body, an instance of unmitigated absolutism. Human nature does not allow of it. In pure despotisms, the practical limitation of the ruler's power lies in his personal fears, in the use of the dagger or the bowstring. These expedients have been brought into exercise before now, both by our foes, the Russians, and, still more so, by our friends, the Turks. Nay, when the present war began, some of our self-made politicians put forward the pleasant suggestion that the Czar's assassination at the hands of his subjects, maddened by taxes and blockades, was a possible path to the triumph of the allies.

 Such is the lawless remedy which nature finds for a lawless tyranny; and no one will deny that such a savage justice is national in certain states of Society, and has a traditional authority, and may in a certain sense be called Constitutional. As society becomes civilized, the checks on arbitrary power assume a form in accordance with a more cultivated morality. We have one curious specimen of a Constitutional principle, preserved to us in the Medo-Persian Empire. It was a wholesome and subtle provision, adopting the semblance of an abject servility suitable to the idea of a despotism, which proclaimed the judgment of the despot infallible, and his word irrevocable. Alexander felt what it was to do irrevocable acts in the physical order, when, in the plenitude of his sovereignty, he actually killed his friend in the banquet; and, as to the vulgar multitude, this same natural result, the remedy or penalty of reckless power, is expressed in the unpolite proverb, "Give a rogue rope enough, and he will hang himself." With a parallel significance, then, it was made a sacred principle among the Medo-Persians, which awed and sobered the monarch himself, from its surpassing inconvenience, that what he once had uttered had the force of fate. It was the punishment of his greatness, that, when Darius would have saved the prophet Daniel from the operation of a law, which the king had been flattered into promulgating, he could not do so.

 A similar check upon the tyranny of power, assuming the character of veneration and homage, is the form and etiquette which is so commonly thrown round a monarch. By irresistible custom, a ceremonial more or less stringent has been made almost to enter into his essential idea, for we know majesty without its externals is a jest; and, while to lay it aside is to relinquish the discriminating badge which is his claim upon the homage of his subjects, to observe it is to surrender himself manicled and fettered into their hands. It is said a king of Spain was roasted to death because the proper official was not found in time to wheel away his royal person from the fire. If etiquette hindered him from saving his own life, etiquette might also interpose an obstacle to his taking the life of another. If it was so necessary for Sancho Panza, governor of Barataria, to eat his dinner with the sanction of the court physician on every dish, other great functionaries of State might possibly be conditions of other indulgences on his part which were less reasonable and less imperative. As for our own most gracious Sovereign, she is honoured with the Constitutional prerogative that "the king can do no wrong;" that is, he can do no political act of his own mere will at all.

 It is, then, no paradox to say that every State has in some sense a Constitution; that is, a set of traditions, depending, not on formal enactment, but on national acceptance, in one way or other restrictive of the ruler's power; though in one country more scientifically developed than another, or more distinctly recognized, or more skilfully and fully adapted to their end. There is a sort of analogy between the political and the physical sense of the word. A man of good constitution is one who has something more than life, viz., a bodily soundness, organic and functional, which will bring him safely through hardships, or illnesses, or dissipations. On the other hand, no one is altogether without a constitution: to say he has nothing to fall back upon, when his health is tried, is almost to pronounce that his life is an accident, and that he may at any moment be carried off. And, in like manner, that must be pronounced no State, but a mere fortuitous collection of individuals, which has no unity stronger than despotism, or deeper than law.

 I am not sure how far it bears upon the main proposition to which these remarks are meant to conduct us, but at least it will illustrate the general subject, if I ask your leave to specify, as regards the depository of political power, four Constitutional principles, distinct in kind from each other, which, among other parallel ones, have had an historical existence. If they must have names given them, they may be called respectively the principles of co-ordination, subordination, delegation, and participation.

 1. As all political power implies unity, the word co-ordination may seem inconsistent with its essential idea: and yet there is a state of society, in which the limitation of despotism is by the voice of the people so unequivocally committed to an external authority, that we must speak of it as the Constitution of such a State, in spite of the seeming anomaly. Such is the recognition of the authority of Religion, as existing in its own substantive institutions, external to the strictly political framework, which even in pagan countries has been at times successfully used to curb the extravagances of absolute power. Putting paganism aside, we find in the history both of Israel and of Judah the tyranny of kings brought within due limits by the priests and prophets, as by legitimate and self-independent authorities. The same has been the case in Christian times. The Church is essentially a popular institution, defending the cause and encouraging the talents of the lower classes, and interposing an external barrier in favour of high or low against the ambition and the rapacity of the temporal power. "If the Christian Church had not existed," says M. Guizot, "the whole world would have been abandoned to unmitigated material force." However, as the corrective principle is in this instance external to the State, though having its root internally in national opinion, it cannot, except improperly, be termed Constitutional.

 2. Next I come to the principle of subordination, which has been commonly found in young, semi-barbarous states both in Europe and Asia, and has attained its most perfect form in what is called the Feudal System. It has had a military origin; and, after the pattern of an army, is carried out in an hierarchy of chiefs, one under the other, each of whom in consequence had direct jurisdiction only over a few. First came the suzerain, or lord paramount, who had the allegiance of a certain number of princes, dukes, counts, or even kings. These were his feudatories, that is, they owed him certain military services, and held their respective territories of him. Their vassals, in turn, were the barons, each under his own prince or duke, and owing him a similar service. Under the barons were the soldiers, each settled down on his own portion of land, with the peasants of the soil as his serfs, and with similar feudal duties to his own baron. A system like this furnished a most perfect expedient against absolutism. Power was distributed among many persons, without confusion or the chance of collision; and, while the paucity of vassals under one and the same rule gave less scope to tyrannical excesses, it created an effective public opinion, which is strongest when the relation between governor and governed is most intimate. Moreover, if any one were disposed to play the tyrant, there were several distinct parties in a condition to unite against him; the barons and lower class against the king, the king and the lower class against the barons. The barbarities of the middle ages have been associated in men's minds with this system; but, whatever they were, they surely took place in spite of it, not through it, just as the anti-Catholic virulence of the present race of Englishmen is mitigated, not caused, by the British Constitution.

 3. By the principle of delegation, I mean that according to which power is committed for a certain time to individuals, with a commensurate responsibility, to be met whenever that time has expired. Thus the Roman Dictator, elected on great emergencies, was autocrat during the term of his rule. Thus a commander of an army has unfettered powers to do what he will, while his command continues; or the captain of a ship; but afterwards his acts are open to inquiry, and, if so be, to animadversion. There are great advantages to a system like this; it is the mode of bringing out great men, and of working great measures. You choose the fittest man for each department; you frankly trust him, you heap powers upon him, you generously support him with your authority, you let him have his own way, you let him do his best. Afterwards you review his proceedings; you reward or censure him. Such, again, in fact, is with us the liberty of the press, censorship being simply unconstitutional, and the courts of law, the remedy against seditious, libellous, or demoralizing publications. Here, too, your advantage is great; you form public opinion, and you ascertain the national mind.

 4. The very opposite to this is the principle of participation . It is that by which a People would leave nothing to its rulers, but has itself, or by its immediate instruments, a concurrent part in everything that is done. Acting on the notion that no one is to be trusted, even for a time, and that every act of its officials is to be jealously watched, it never commits power without embarrassing its exercise. Instead of making a venture for the transcendent, it keeps fast by a safe mediocrity. It rather trusts a dozen persons than one to do its work. This is the great principle of boards and officers, engaged in checking each other, with a second apparatus to check the first apparatus, and other functionaries to keep an eye on both of them, Tom helping Jack, and Jack waiting for Bill, till the end is lost in the means. Such seems to have been the principle of the military duties performed by the Aulic Council in Germany, which virtually co-operated with Napoleon in his victories in that country. Such is the great principle of committees of taste, which have covered this fair land with architectural monstrosities. And as being closely allied to the principle of comprehension and compromise (a principle, necessary indeed, in some shape, but admitting of ruinous excess), it has had an influence on our national action in matters more serious than architecture or sculpture. And it has told directly upon our political efficiency.

 Letter 4. Characteristics of the Athenians

 NOW at length I am drawing near the subject which I have undertaken to treat, though Athens is both in leagues and in centuries a great way off England after all. But first to recapitulate: a State or polity implies two things, Power on the one hand, Liberty on the other; a Rule and a Constitution. Power, when freely developed, results in centralization; Liberty in self-government. The two principles are in antagonism from their very nature; so far forth as you have rule, you have not liberty; so far forth as you have liberty, you have not rule. If a People gives up nothing at all, it remains a mere People, and does not rise to be a State. If it gives up everything, it could not be worse off, though it gave up nothing. Accordingly, it always must give up something; it never can give up everything; and in every case the problem to be decided is, what is the most advisable compromise, what point is the maximum of at once protection and independence.

 Those political institutions are the best which subtract as little as possible from a people's natural independence as the price of their protection. The stronger you make the Ruler, the more he can do for you, but the more he also can do against you; the weaker you make him, the less he can do against you, but the less also he can do for you. The Man promised to kill the Stag; but he fairly owned that he must be first allowed to mount the Horse. Put a sword into the Ruler's hands, it is at his option to use or not use it against you; reclaim it, and who is to use it for you? Thus, if States are free, they are feeble; if they are vigorous, they are high-handed. I am not speaking of a nation or a people, but of a State as such; and I say, the more a State secures to itself of rule and centralization, the more it can do for its subjects externally; and the more it grants to them of liberty and self-government, the less it can do against them internally: and thus a despotic government is the best for war, and a popular government the best for peace.

 Now this may seem a paradox so far as this; that I have said a State cannot be at once free and strong, whereas the combination of these advantages is the very boast which we make about our own island in one of our national songs, which runs,

 "Britannia, rule the waves!  Britons never shall be slaves ."

 I acknowledge the force of this authority; but I must recall the reader's attention to the distinction which I have just been making between a Nation and a State. Britons are free, considered as a State; they are strong, considered as a Nation; and, as a good deal depends on this distinction, I will illustrate it, before I come to the consideration of our own country, by the instance of that ancient and famous people whose name I have prefixed to this portion of my inquiry, a people who, in most respects, are as unlike us, as beauty is unlike utility, but who are in this respect, strange to say, not dissimilar to the Briton.

 So pure a democracy was Athens, that, if any of its citizens was eminent, he might be banished by the rest for this simple offence of greatness. Self-government was developed there in the fullest measure, as if provision was not at all needed against any foe. Nor indeed in the earlier period of Athens, was it required; for the poverty of the soil, and the extent of seaboard as its boundary, secured it against both the cupidity and the successful enterprise of invaders. The chief object, then, of its polity was the maintenance of internal order; but even in this respect solicitude was superfluous, according to its citizens themselves, who were accustomed to boast that they were attracted, one and all, in one and the same way, and moulded into a body politic, by an innate perception of the beautiful and true, and that the genius and cultivation of mind, which were their characteristics, served them better for the observance of the rules of good fellowship and for carrying on the intercourse of life, than the most stringent laws and the best appointed officers of police.

 Here then was the extreme of self-government carried out; and the State was intensely free. That in proportion to that internal freedom was its weakness in its external relations, its uncertainty, caprice, injustice, and untrustworthiness, history, I think, abundantly shows. It may be thought unfair to appeal to the age of Philip and Demosthenes, when no Greek State could oppose a military organization worthy of such a foe as Macedon; but at no anterior period had it shown a vigour and perseverance similar to the political force of the barbaric monarchy, which extinguished its liberties. It was simply unable to defend and perpetuate that democratical license which it so inordinately prized.

 Had Athens then no influence on the world outside of it, because its political influence was so baseless and fluctuating? Has she gained no conquests, exercised no rule, affected no changes, left no traces of herself upon the nations? On the contrary, never was country able to do so much; never has country so impressed its image upon the history of the world, except always that similarly small strip of land in Syria. And moreover, for this I wish to insist upon, rather than merely concede, this influence of hers was in consequence, though not by means, of her democratical regime . That democratical polity formed a People, who could do what democracy itself could not do. Feeble all together, the Athenians were superlatively energetic one by one. It was their very keenness of intellect individually which made them collectively so inefficient. This point of character, insisted on both by friendly and hostile orators in the pages of her great historian, is a feature in which Athens resembles England. Englishmen, indeed, do not go to work with the grace and poetry which, if Pericles is to be believed, characterized an Athenian; but Athens may boast of her children as having the self-reliance, the spirit, and the unflagging industry of the individual Englishman.

 It was this individualism which was the secret of the power of Athens in her day, and remains as the instrument of her influence now. What was her trade, or her colonies, or her literature, but private, not public achievements, the triumph, not of State policy, but of personal effort? Rome sent out her colonies, as Russia now, with political foresight; modern Europe has its State Universities, its Royal Academies, its periodical scientific Associations; it was otherwise with Athens. There, great things were done by citizens working in their private capacity; working, it must be added, not so much from patriotism as for their personal advantage; or, if with patriotism, still with little chance of State encouragement or reward. Socrates, the greatest of her moralists, and since his day one of her chief glories, lived unrecognized and unrewarded, and died under a judicial sentence. Xenophon conducted his memorable retreat across Asia Minor, not as an Athenian, but as the mercenary or volunteer of a Persian Prince. Miltiades was of a family of adventurers, who by their private energy had founded a colony, and secured a lordship in the Chersonese; and he met his death while prosecuting his private interests with his country's vessels. Themistocles had a double drift, patriotic and traitorous, in the very acts by which he secured to the Greeks the victory of Salamis, having in mind that those acts should profit him at the Persian court, if they did not turn to his account at home. Perhaps we are not so accurately informed of what took place at Rome, when Hannibal threatened the city; but certainly Rome presents us with the picture of a strong State at that crisis, whereas, in the parallel trial, the Athens of Miltiades and Themistocles shows like the clever, dashing population of a large town.

 We have another sample of the genius of her citizens in their conduct at Pylos. Neither they, nor their officers, would obey the orders of the elder Demosthenes, who was sent out to direct the movements of the fleet. In vain did he urge them to fortify the place; they did nothing; till, the bad weather detaining them on shore, and inaction becoming tedious, suddenly they fell upon the work with a will; and, having neither tools nor carriages, hunted up stones where they could find them ready in the soil, made clay do the office of mortar, carried the materials on their backs, supporting them with their clasped hands, and thus finished the necessary works in the course of a few days.

 By this personal enterprise and daring the Athenians were distinguished from the rest of Greece. "They are fond of change," say their Corinthian opponents in the Lacedemonian Council; "quick to plan and to perform, venturing beyond their power, hazarding beyond their judgment, and always sanguine in whatever difficulties. They are alive, while you, O Lacedemonians, dawdle; and they love locomotion, while you are especially a home-people. They think to gain a point, even when they withdraw; but with you, even to advance is to surrender what you have attained. When they defeat their foe, they rush on; when they are beaten, they hardly fall back. What they plan and do not follow up, they deem an actual loss; what they set about and gain, they count a mere instalment of the future; what they attempt and fail in here, in anticipation they make up for there. Such is their labour and their risk from youth to age; no men enjoy so little what they have, for they are always getting, and their best holiday is to do a stroke of needful work; and it is a misfortune to them to have to undergo, not the toil of business, but the listlessness of repose."

 I do not mean to say that I trace the Englishman in every clause of this passage; but he is so far portrayed in it as a whole, as to suggest to us that perhaps he too, as well as the Athenian, has that inward spring of restless independence, which makes a State weak, and a Nation great.

 Letter 5. Parallel Characteristics of Englishmen

 I HOPE I have now made it clear, that, in saying that a free State will not be strong, I am far indeed from saying that a People with what is called a free Constitution will not be active, powerful, influential, and successful. I am only saying that it will do its great deeds, not through the medium of its government, or politically, but through the medium of its individual members, or nationally . Self-government, which is another name for political weakness, may really be the means or the token of national greatness. Athens, as a State, was wanting in the elements of integrity, firmness, and consistency; but perhaps that political deficiency was the very condition and a result of her intellectual activity.

 I will allow more than this readily. Not only in cases such as that of Athens, is the State's loss the Nation's gain, but further, most of those very functions which in despotisms are undertaken by the State may be performed in free countries by the Nation. For instance, roads, the posts, railways, bridges, aqueducts, and the like, in absolute monarchies, are governmental matters; but they may be left to private energy, where self-government prevails. Letter-carriage indeed involves an extent of system and a punctuality in work, which is too much for any combination of individuals; but the care of Religion, which is a governmental work in Russia, and partly so in England, is left to private competition in the United States. Education, in like manner, is sometimes provided by the State, sometimes left to religious denominations, sometimes to private zeal and charity. The Fine Arts sometimes depend on the patronage of Court or Government; sometimes are given in charge to Academies; sometimes to committees or vestries.

 I do not say that a Nation will manage all these departments equally well, or so well as a despotic government; and some departments it will not be able to manage at all. Did I think it could manage all, I should have nothing to write about. I am distinctly maintaining that the war department it cannot manage; that is my very point. It cannot conduct a war; but not from any fault in the nation, or with any resulting disparagement to popular governments and Constitutional States, but merely because we cannot have all things at once in this world, however big we are, and because, in the nature of things, one thing cannot be another. I do not say that a Constitutional State never must risk war, never must engage in war, never will conquer in war; but that its strong point lies in the other direction. If we would see what liberty, independence, self-government, a popular Constitution, can do, we must look to times of tranquillity. In peace a self-governing nation is prosperous in itself, and influential in the wide world. Its special works, the sciences, the useful arts, literature, the interests of knowledge generally, material comfort, the means and appliances of a happy life, thrive especially in peace. And thus such a nation spreads abroad, and subdues the world, and reigns in the admiration and gratitude and deference of men, by the use of weapons which war shivers to pieces. Alas! that mortals do not know themselves, and will not (according to the proverb) cut their coat according to their cloth! " Optat ephippia bos ." John Bull, like other free, self-governing nations, would undertake a little war just now, as if it were his forte, as great lawyers have cared for nothing but a reputation for dancing gracefully, and literary men have bought a complex coat-of-arms at the Heralds' College. Why will we not content to be human? why not content with the well-grounded consciousness that no polity in the world is so wonderful, so good to its subjects, so favourable to individual energy, so pleasant to live under, as our own? I do not say, why will we go to war? but, why will we not think twice first? why do we not ascertain our actual position, our strength, our weakness, before we do so?

 For centuries upon centuries England has been, like Attica, a secluded land; so remote from the highway of the world, so protected from the flood of Eastern and Northern barbarism, that her children have grown into a magnanimous contempt of external danger. They have had "a cheap defence" in the stormy sea which surrounds them; and, from time immemorial, they have had such skill in weathering it, that their wooden walls, to use the Athenian term, became a second rampart against the foe, whom wind and water did not overwhelm. So secure have they felt in those defences, that they have habitually neglected others; so that, in spite of their valour, when a foe once gained the shore, be he Dane, or Norman, or Dutch, he was encountered by no sustained action or organized resistance, and became their king. These, however, were rare occurrences, and made no lasting impression; they were not sufficient to divert them from pursuing, or to thwart them in attaining, the amplest measures of liberty. Whom had the people to fear? not even their ships, which could not, like military, become a paid force encircling a tyrant, and securing him against their resistance.

 To these outward circumstances of England, determining the direction of its political growth, must be added the character of the people themselves. There are races to whom consanguinity itself is not concord and unanimity, but the reverse. They fight with each other, for lack of better company. Imaginative, fierce, vindictive, with their clans, their pedigrees, and their feuds, snorting war, spurning trade or tillage, the old Highlanders, if placed on the broad plains of England, would have in time run through their national existence, and died the death of the sons of Rdipus. But, if you wish to see the sketch of a veritable Englishman in strong relief, refresh your recollection of Walter Scott's "Two Drovers." He is indeed rough, surly, a bully and a bigot; these are his weak points: but if ever there was a generous, good, tender heart, it beats within his breast. Most placable, he forgives and forgets: forgets, not only the wrongs he has received, but the insults he has inflicted. Such he is commonly; for doubtless there are times and circumstances in his dealings with foreigners in which, whether when in despair or from pride, he becomes truculent and simply hateful; but at home his bark is worse than his bite. He has qualities, excellent for the purposes of neighbourhood and intercourse; and he has, besides, a shrewd sense, and a sobriety of judgment, and a practical logic, which passion does not cloud, and which makes him understand that good-fellowship is not only commendable, but expedient too. And he has within him a spring of energy, pertenacity, and perseverance, which makes him as busy and effective in a colony as he is companionable at home. Some races do not move at all; others are ever jostling against each other; the Englishman is ever stirring, yet never treads too hard upon his fellow-countryman's toes. He does his work neatly, silently, in his own place; he looks to himself, and can take care of himself; and he has that instinctive veneration for the law, that he can worship it even in the abstract, and thus is fitted to go shares with others all around him in that political sovereignity, which other races are obliged to concentrate in one ruler.

 There was a time when England was divided into seven principalities, formed out of the wild warriors whom the elder race had called in to their own extermination. What would have been the history of those kingdoms if the invaders had been Highlanders instead of Saxons? But the Saxon Heptarchy went on, without any very desperate wars of kingdom with kingdom, pretty much as the nation goes on now. Indeed, I much question, supposing Englishmen rose one morning and found themselves in a Heptarchy again, whether its seven portions would not jog on together, much as they do now under Queen Victoria, the union in both cases depending, not so much on the government and the governed, but on the people, viewed in themselves, to whom peaceableness, justice, and non-interference are natural.

 It is an invaluable national quality to be keen, yet to be fair to others; to be inquisitive, acquisitive, enterprising, aspiring, progressive, without encroaching upon his next neighbour's right to be the same. Such a people hardly need a Ruler, as being mainly free from the infirmities which make a ruler necessary. Law, like medicine, is only called for to assist nature; and, when nature does so much for a people, the wisest policy is, as far as possible, to leave them to themselves. This, then, is the science of government with English Statesmen, to leave the people alone; a free action, a clear stage, and they will do the rest for themselves. The more a Ruler meddles, the less he succeeds; the less he initiates, the more he accomplishes; his duty is that of overseeing, facilitating, encouraging, guiding, interposing on emergencies. Some races are like children, and require a despot to nurse, and feed, and dress them, to give them pocket money, and take them out for airings. Others, more manly, prefer to be rid of the trouble of their affairs, and use their Ruler as their mere manager and man of business. Now an Englishman likes to take his own matters into his own hands. He stands on his own ground, and does as much work as half a dozen men of certain other races. He can join too with others, and has a turn for organizing, but he insists on its being voluntary. He is jealous of no one, except kings and governments, and offensive to no one except their partisans and creatures.

 This, then, is the people for private enterprise; and of private enterprise alone have I been speaking all along. What a place is London in its extent, its complexity, its myriads of dwellings, its subterraneous works! It is the production, for the most part, of individual enterprise. Waterloo Bridge was the greatest architectural achievement of the generation before this; it was built by shares. New regions, with streets of palaces and shops innumerable, each shop a sort of shrine or temple of this or that trade, and each a treasure-house of its own merchandize, grow silently into existence, the creation of private spirit and speculation. The gigantic system of railroads rises and asks for its legal status : prudent statesmen decide that it must be left to private companies, to the exclusion of Government. Trade is to be encouraged: the best encouragement is, that it should be free. A famine threatens; one thing must be avoided, any meddling on the part of Government with the export and import of provisions.

 Emigration is in vogue: out go swarms of colonists, not, as in ancient times, from the Prytaneum, under State guidance and with religious rites, but each by himself, and at his own arbitrary and sudden will. The ship is wrecked; the passengers are cast upon a rock, or make the hazard of a raft. In the extremest peril, in the most delicate and most anxious of operations, every one seems to find his place, as if by magic, and does his work, and subserves the rest with coolness, cheerfulness, gentleness, and without a master. Or they have a fair passage, and gain their new country; each takes his allotted place there, and works in it in his own way. Each acts irrespectively of the rest, takes care of number one, with a kind word and deed for his neighbour, but still as fully understanding that he must depend for his own welfare on himself. Pass a few years, and a town has risen on the desert beach, and houses of business are extending their connexions and influence up the country. At length, a company of merchants make the place their homestead, and they protect themselves from their enemies with a fort. They need a better defence than they have provided, for a numerous host is advancing upon them, and they are likely to be driven into the sea. Suddenly a youth, the castaway of his family, half-clerk, half-soldier, puts himself at the head of a few troops, defends posts, gains battles, and ends in founding a mighty empire over the graves of Mahmood and Aurungzebe.

 It is the deed of one man; and so, wherever we go all over the earth, it is the solitary Briton, the London agent, or the Milordos, who is walking restlessly about, abusing the natives, and raising a colossus, or setting the Thames on fire, in the East or the West. He is on the top of the Andes, or in a diving-bell in the Pacific, or taking notes at Timbuctoo, or grubbing at the Pyramids, or scouring over the Pampas, or acting as prime minister to the king of Dahomey, or smoking the pipe of friendship with the Red Indians, or hutting at the Pole. No one can say beforehand what will come of these various specimens of the independent, self-governing, self-reliant Englishman. Sometimes failure, sometimes openings for trade, scientific discoveries, or political aggrandizements. His country and his government have the gain; but it is he who is the instrument of it, and not political organization, centralization, systematic plans, authoritative acts. The polity of England is what it was before, the Government weak, the Nation strong, strong in the strength of its multitudinous enterprise, which gives to its Government a position in the world, which that Government could not claim for itself by any prowess or device of its own.

 Letter 6. Reverse of the Picture

 THE social union promises two great and contrary advantages, Protection and Liberty, such protection as shall not interfere with liberty, and such liberty as shall not interfere with protection. How much a given nation can secure of the one, and how much of the other, depends on its peculiar circumstances. As there are small frontier territories, which find it their interest to throw themselves into the hands of some great neighbour, sacrificing their liberties as the price of purchasing safety from barbarians or rivals, so too there are countries which, in the absence of external danger, have abandoned themselves to the secure indulgence of freedom, to the jealous exercise of self-government, and to the scientific formation of a Constitution. And as, when liberty has to be surrendered for protection, the Horse must not be surprised if the Man whips or spurs him, so, when protection is neglected for the sake of liberty, he must not be surprised if he suffers from the horns of the Stag.

 Protected by the sea, and gifted with a rare energy, self-possession, and imperturbability, the English people have been able to carry out self-government to its limits, and to absorb into its constitutional action many of those functions which are necessary for the protection of any country, and commonly belong to the Executive; and triumphing in their marvellous success they have thought no task too hard for them, and have from time to time attempted more than even England could accomplish. Such a crisis has come upon us now, and the Constitution has not been equal to the occasion. For a year past we have been conducting a great war on our Constitutional routine, and have not succeeded in it. If we continue that routine, we shall have more failures, with France or Russia (whichever you please) to profit by it: if we change it, we change what after all is Constitutional. It is this dilemma which makes me wish for peace, or else some Deus è machinâ, some one greater even than Wellington, to carry us through. We cannot depend upon Constitutional routine .

 People abuse routine, and say that all the mischief which happens is the fault of routine ; but can they get out of routine, without getting out of the Constitution? That is the question. The fault of a routine Executive, I suppose, is not that the Executive always goes on in one way, else, system is in fault, but that it goes on in a bad way, or on a bad system. We must either change the system, then, our Constitutional system; or not find fault with its routine, which is according to it. The present Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, for instance, is either a function and instrument of the routine system, and therefore is making bad worse, or is not, and then perhaps it is only the beginning of an infringement of the Constitution. There may be Constitutional failures which have no Constitutional remedies, unwilling as we may be to allow it. They may be necessarily incidental to a free self-governing people.

 The Executive of a nation is the same all over the world, being, in other words, the administration of the nation's affairs; it differs in different countries, not in its nature and office, nor in its ends, acts, or functions, but in its characteristics, as being prompt, direct, effective, or the contrary; that is, as being strong or feeble. If it pursues its ends earnestly, performs its acts vigorously and discharges its functions successfully, then it is a strong Executive; if otherwise, it is feeble. Now, it is obvious, the more it is concentrated, that is, the fewer are its springs, and the simpler its mechanism, the stronger it is, because it has least friction and loss of power; on the other hand, the more numerous and widely dispersed its centres of action are, and the more complex and circuitous their inter-action, the more feeble it is. It is strongest, then, when it is lodged in one man out of the whole nation; it is feeblest, when it is lodged, by participation or conjointly, in every man in it. How can we help what is self-evident? If the English people lodge power in the many, not in the few, what wonder that its operation is roundabout, clumsy, slow, intermittent, and disappointing? And what is the good of finding fault with the routine, if it is after all the principle of the routine, or the system, or the Constitution, which causes the hitch? You cannot eat your cake and have it; you cannot be at once a self-governing nation and have a strong government. Recollect Wellington's question in opposition to the Reform Bill, "How is the King's Government to be carried on?" We are beginning to experience its full meaning.

 A people so alive, so curious, so busy as the English, will be a power in themselves, independently of political arrangements; and will be on that very ground jealous of a rival, impatient of a master, and strong enough to cope with the one and to withstand the other. A government is their natural foe; they cannot do without it altogether, but they will have of it as little as they can. They will forbid the concentration of power; they will multiply its seats, complicate its acts, and make it safe by making it inefficient. They will take care that it is the worst-worked of all the many organizations which are found in their country. As despotisms keep their subjects in ignorance, lest they should rebel, so will a free people maim and cripple their government, lest it should tyrannize.

 This is human nature; the more powerful a man is, the more jealous is he of other powers. Little men endure little men; but great men aim at a solitary grandeur. The English nation is intensely conscious of itself; it has seen, inspected, recognized, appreciated, and warranted itself. It has erected itself into a personality, under the style and title of John Bull. Most neighbourly is he when let alone; but irritable, when commanded or coerced. He wishes to form his own judgment in all matters, and to have everything proved to him; he dislikes the thought of generously placing his interests in the hands of others, he grudges to give up what he cannot really keep himself, and stickles for being at least a sleeping partner in transactions which are beyond him. He pays his people for their work, and is as proud of them, if they do it well, as a rich man of his tall footmen.

 Policy might teach him a different course. If you want your work done well, which you cannot do yourself, find the best man, put it into his hand, and trust him implicitly. An Englishman is too sensible not to understand this in private matters; but in matters of State he is afraid of such a policy. He prefers the system of checks and counter-checks, the division of power, the imperative concurrence of disconnected officials, and his own supervision and revision, the method of hitches, cross-purposes, collisions, deadlocks, to the experiment of treating his public servants as gentlemen. I am not quarelling with what is inevitable in his system of self-government; I only say that he cannot expect his work done in the best style, if this is his mode of providing for it. Duplicate functionaries do but merge responsibility; and a jealous master is paid with formal, heartless service. Do your footmen love you across the gulf which you have fixed between them and you? and can you expect your store-keepers and harbour-masters at Balaklava not to serve you by rule and precedent, not to be rigid in their interpretation of your orders, and to commit themselves as little as they can, when you show no belief in their zeal, and have no mercy on their failures?

 England, surely, is the paradise of little men, and the purgatory of great ones. May I never be a Minister of State or a Field-Marshal! I'd be an individual, self-respecting Briton, in my own private castle, with the Times to see the world by, and pen and paper to scribble off withal to some public print, and set the world right. Public men are only my employés ; I use them as I think fit, and turn them off without warning. Aberdeen, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Newcastle, what are they muttering about services and ingratitude? were they not paid? hadn't they their regular quarter-day? Raglan, Burgoyne, Dundas, I cannot recollect all the fellows' names, can they merit aught? can they be profitable to me their lord and master? And so, having no tenderness or respect for their persons, their antecedents, or their age, not caring that in fact they are serving me with all their strength, not asking whether, if they manage ill, it be not, perchance, because they are in the fetters of Constitutional red tape, which have weighed on their hearts and deadened their energies, till the hazard of failure and the fear of censure have quenched the spirit of daring, I think it becoming and generous, during, not after their work, not when it is ended, but in the very agony of conflict, to institute a formal process of inquiry into their demerits, not secret, not indulgent to their sense of honour, but in the hearing of all Europe, and amid the scorn of the world, hitting down, knocking over, my workhouse apprentices, in order that they may get up again, and do my matters for me better.

 How far these ways of managing a crisis can be amended in a self-governing Nation, it is most difficult to say. They are doubly deplorable, as being both unjust and impolitic. They are kind, neither to ourselves, nor to our public servants; and they so unpleasantly remind one of certain passages of Athenian history, as to suggest that perhaps they must ever more or less exist, except where a despotism, by simply extinguishing liberty, effectually prevents its abuse.

 Letter 7. English Jealousy of Law Courts

 PEOPLE account for the mismanagement existing in the department of the military service, on the ground that war is a novelty in this generation, and that it will be corrected after the successive failures of a few years. This doubtless has something to do with our failure, but it is not a full explanation of it; else, there would be no mismanagements in time of peace. But, if mismanagements exist in peace as well as in war, then we may conclude that they are some defect in our talent for organization; a defect, the more unaccountable, because Englishmen are far from wanting in this faculty, as is shown by the great undertakings of our master builders and civil engineers. Yet all the time that private men have been directing matters and men on a large scale to definite ends, there has been a general feeling in the community that a government proceeding is a blunder or a job. From the Irish famines of 1822 to that of 1845 and following years, I think I recollect instances in point, though I have got no list to produce. As to the latter occasion, it is commonly said that to this day the Irish will not believe, in spite of the many millions voted to them by Parliament, that their population has not been deliberately murdered by the Government. This was a far larger instance of mismanagement than that which the present Parliamentary Committee will bring to light. How then shall we account for the phenomenon of the incapable Executive of a capable people better than by saying, that, for the very reason the people is capable, its Executive is incapable, as I have been urging all along? It is true, there are public departments of acknowledged efficiency, as the Post Office and the Police; but these only show what the Executive could be, if the Nation gave it fair play.

 And thus I might end my remarks on the subject, which have already been discursive and excursive, beyond the patience of most readers; and yet I think it worth while, Mr. Editor, to try it a little more, if I gain your consent to my doing so. For I have not yet brought out so clearly as I wish, the relation of the Nation to the Executive, as it exists in this corner of the earth.

 The functions of the Executive are such as police, judicature, religion, education, finance, foreign transactions, war. The acts of the Executive are such as the appointment, instruction, supervision, punishment, and removal of its functionaries. The end of the Executive is to perform those functions by means of those acts with despatch and success; that is, so to appoint, instruct, superintend, and support its functionaries, as effectually to protect person and property, to dispense justice, to uphold religion, to provide for the country's expenses, to promote and extend its trade, to maintain its place in the political world, and to make it victorious and formidable. These things, and such as these, are the end, the direct, intelligible end, of the Executive; and to secure their accomplishment, and to secure men to accomplish them, one would suppose would be the one and only object of all Executive government; but it is not the only object of the English.

 A very few words will explain what I mean. John, Duke of Marlborough, obtained for the town of Witney a monopoly of blanket-making: accordingly, I believe, Witney at one time supplied the whole nation with blankets of such size and quality as the men of Witney chose. Looking at this as a national act, one would say, that the object of the nation was, not to provide itself with best blankets, but with Witney blankets; and, did a foreigner object that the blankets were not good, he would speak beside the mark, and be open to the retort, "Nobody said they were good; what we maintain is that they come from Witney." Now, applying this illustration to our present circumstances, I humbly submit that, though the end of every Executive, as such, is to do its work well, cheaply, and promptly, yet, were the French in the Crimea to judge us by this principle, and to marvel at our choosing neither means or men in accordance with it, they would be simply criticising what they did not understand. The Nation's object never was that the Executive should be worked in the best possible way, but that the Nation should work it. It is altogether a family concern on a very large scale: the Executive is more or less in commission, and the commission is the Nation itself. It vests in itself, as represented by its different classes, in perpetuity, the prerogative of jobbing the Executive. Nor is this so absurd as it seems: the Nation has two ends in view, quite distinct from the proper end of the Executive itself; first, that the Government should not do too much, and next, that itself should have a real share in the Government. The balance of power, which has been the mainspring of our foreign politics, is the problem of our home affairs also. The great State Commission must be distributed in shares, in correspondence with the respective pretensions of its various expectants. Some States are cemented by loyalty, others by religion; but ours by self-interest, in a large sense of the word. Each element of the political structure demands its special retainer; and power is committed, not to the highest capacity, but to the largest possible constituency. The general public, the constituency, the press, the aristocracy, the capital of the country, the mercantile interest, the Crown, the Court, the great Constitutional parties, Whig and Tory, the great religious parties, Church and Dissent, the country gentlemen, the professions all must have their part and their proportion in the administration. Such is the will of the Nation, which had rather that its institutions should be firm and stable, than that they should be effective.

 But the Sovereign, perhaps it will be said, is the source of all jurisdiction in the English body political, as Tudor monarchs asserted, and Constitutional lawyers have handed down to us; yes, as the Merovingian king, not the Mayor of the Palace, was ruler of France, and as the Great Mogul, not the Company, is the supreme power in Hindostan. Could Victoria resume at her will that power which the Tudors exercised, but which slipped out of the hands of the Stuarts? The Pope, too, leaves his jurisdiction in the hands of numberless subordinate authorities, patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops, sacred congregations, religious orders; he, however, can, if he pleases, recall what he has given, and sometimes, in fact, he does put them all aside. I think it would astonish the public if, to take a parallel case, our gracious Sovereign, motu proprio, were to resume the management of the Crown lands, or re-distribute the dioceses without an Act of Parliament. Let us dismiss from our minds the fictions of antiquarians; the British people divide among themselves the executive powers of the Crown: and now to give some illustrations in point.

 The end of the Judicature is justice. The functionaries are commonly a jury, made up of men, not specially prepared for their occasional office, but chosen for it as representatives of a class, and performing it under the direction of a properly educated and experienced dignitary, called by courtesy the Judge. When I was young, I recollect being shocked at hearing an eminent man inveigh against this time-honoured institution, as if absurdly unfitted to promote the ends of the Law. He was answered by an able lawyer, who has since occupied the judicial bench; and he, instead of denying that precise allegation, argued that the institution had a beneficial political effect on the classes who were liable to serve as jurymen, as associating them with the established order of things, and investing them with salutary responsibilities. There is a good deal in this reason: a still more plausible defence, I think, may be found in the consideration of the inexpediency of suffering the tradition of Law to flow separate from that of popular feeling, whereas there ought to be a continual influx of the national mind into the judicial conscience; and, unless there was this careful adjustment between law and politics, the standards of right and wrong, set up at Westminster, would diverge from those received by the community at large, and the Nation might some day find itself condemned and baffled by its own supreme oracle of truth. This would be gravely inconvenient; accordingly, as the Star Chamber recognized the royal decisions as precedents in law, and formed a tradition of the Court, so it is imperative, in our better state of things, that Public Opinion should give the law to Law, and should rule those questions which directly bear upon any matter of national concern. By the expedient, then, of a Jury, the good of the country is made to take the lead of private interest; for better far is it that injustice should be done to a pack of individuals, than that the maxims of the Nation should at any time incur the animadversion of its own paid officials, and a deadlock in State matters should be the result of so unfortunate an antagonism.

 What makes me think that this is the real meaning of a jury, is what has lately taken place in a parallel way in the Committee of Privy Council on the baptismal controversy. My lords refused to go into the question of the truth of the doctrine in dispute, or into the meaning of the language used in the Prayer Book; they merely asserted that a certain neutral reading of that language, by which it would bear contrary senses, was more congenial with the existing and traditional sentiments of the English people. They felt profoundly that it would never do to have the Church of the Nation at variance in opinion with the Nation itself. In other words, neither does English law seek justice, nor English religion seek truth, as ultimate and simple ends, but such a justice and such a truth as may not be inconsistent with the interests of large conservatism.

 Again, I have been told by an eminent lawyer, that, in another ecclesiastical dispute which came before the Queen's Bench, a Chief Justice, now no more, rather than commit the Court to an unpopular decision, reversed the precedents of several centuries. No one could suspect that upright Judge of cowardice, time-serving, or party prejudice. The circumstances explained the act. Those precedents were out of keeping with the present national mind, which must be the perpetual standard and authoritative interpreter of the law; and, as the Minister for Foreign Affairs instructs the Queen's representative at a Congress, what to think and say, so it is the Nation's right to impose upon the Judges the duty of expounding certain points of law in a sense agreeable to its high and mighty self. Accordingly the Chief Justice's decision on the occasion in question resulted in giving the public (as Lord John Russell expressed it as regards the Baptismal question) "great satisfaction." For satisfaction, peace, liberty, conservative interests, were the supreme end of the law, and not mere raw justice, as such. It is another illustration of the same spirit, though it does not strictly fall under our subject, that, at the public meeting held to thank that earnest and energetic man, Mr. Maurice, for the particular complexion of one portion of his theology, a speaker congratulated him on having, in questioning or denying eternal punishment, given (not a more correct, but) a "more genial" interpretation to the declarations of Holy Scripture.

 Much, again, might be said upon the Constitutional rights of wealth, as tending to the weakening of the Executive. Wealth does not indeed purchase the higher appointments in the Law, but it can purchase situations, not only in the clerical, but in the military and civil services, and in the legislature. It is difficult to draw the line between such recognized transactions, and what is invidiously called corruption. As to parliamentary matters, I can easily understand the danger of that mode of proceeding, which I have called Constitutional, being carried too far. I can do justice to the feeling which, on a late occasion, if I recollect rightly, caused a will to be set aside, which provided for the purchase of a peerage. We must, of course, draw the line somewhere; but if you take your stand on principle, as it is the fashion to do, then I cannot go along with you, and have never been able to see the specific wickedness (where oaths are not broken or evaded) of buying a seat in Parliament, as contrasted with the purchase of an eligible incumbency. It must not be forgotten, that, from the time of Sir Robert Walpole, bribes, to use an uncivil word, have been necessary to our Constitutional regime, visions of a higher but impracticable system having died away with Bolingbroke's "Patriot King."

 This is but one instance of what is seen in so many various ways, that our Executive is on principle subordinate to class interests; we consider it better that it should work badly, than work to the inconvenience and danger of our national liberties. Such is self-government. Ideal standards, generous motives, pure principles, precise aims, scientific methods, must be excluded, and national utility must be the rule of administration. It is not a high system, but no human system is such. The knout and the tar-barrel aforementioned are not more defensible modes of proceeding, and are less pleasant than ours. Under ours, the individual is consulted for far more carefully than under despotism or democracy. Injustice is the exception; a free and easy mode of living is the rule. It is a venal régime ; que voulez-vous ? improvement may make things worse. It succeeds in making things pleasant at home; whether it succeeds in war is another question.

 Letter 8. English Jealousy of Church and Army

 IN spite of the administrative weakness, characteristic of the English Constitution, from its defects in organization, from the interference of traditional principles and extraneous influences in its working, and from the corruption and jobbing incident to it, still so vast are its benefits in the security which it offers to person and property, in the freedom of speech, locomotion, and action, in the religious toleration, and in the general tranquillity and comfort, which go with it; and again, so numerous and various are the material and mechanical advantages which the energy of the people has associated with it, that, I suppose, England is, in a political and national point of view, the best country to live in in the world. It has not the climate, it has not the faith, it has not the grace and sweetness, the festive cheerfulness, the social radiance, of some foreign cities and people; but nowhere else surely can you have so much your own way, nowhere can you find ready to your hand so many of your wants and wishes. Take things as a whole, and the Executive and Nation work well, viewed in their results. What is it to the average Englishman that a jury sometimes gives an unjust verdict, that seats in Parliament are virtually bought, that the prizes of the Establishment are attained by interest, not merit, that political parties and great families monopolize the government, and share among themselves its places and appointments, or that the public press is every now and then both cowardly and tyrannical, what is all this compared with the upshot of the whole national and political system?

 Look at things as a philosopher, and you will learn resignation, or rather thankful content, by perceiving that they all so hang together, that on the whole you cannot make them much better, nor can gain much more without losing much. No idea or principle of political society includes in its operation all conceivable good, or excludes all evil; that is the best form of society which has most of the good, and least of the bad. In the English ideal, the Nation is the centre, "l'Etat c'est moi:" and everything else is dependent and subservient. We are carried back in our thoughts to the fable of Menenius Agrippa, though with a changed adaptation. The Nation is the sacred seat of vital heat and nourishment, the original element, and the first principle, and the number one of the State framework, and in its various members we find, not what is most effective or exquisite of its kind, but accessories compatible with the supremacy of that digestive and nutritive apparatus. The whole body politic is in unity "cujus participatio ejus in id ipsum." The kingly office does not give scope for the best of conceivable kings, but for the chief of a self-governing people; the ministers of state, the members of Parliament, the judges, are not intended to be perfect in their own kind respectively, but national statesmen, councillors and lawyers; the bishops and commanders of the forces, the squires and the justices of the peace, belong to a Constitutional clergy, soldiery, and magistracy. I will not say that nothing admits of improvement, or what is called "reform," in such a society; I will not attempt to determine the limits of improvement; still a limit there is, and things must remain in substance what they are, or "Old England" will cease to be. Let us be merciful to ourselves; as in our own persons, one by one, we consult for our particular constitution of mind and body, and avoid efforts and aims, modes of exercise and diet, which are unsuitable to it, so in like manner those who appreciate the British Constitution aright will show their satisfaction at what it does well, resignation as to what it cannot do, and prudence in steering clear of those problems which are difficult or dangerous in respect to it. Such men will not make it dance on its lame leg. They will not go to war, if they can help it, for the conduct of war is not among its chef-d'Suvres, as I now, for positively the last time, will explain.

 Material force is the ultima ratio of political society everywhere. Arms alone can keep the peace; and, as all other professions are reducible to system and rule, there is of course a science and an art of war. This art is learned like other arts by study and practice; it supposes the existence of expounders and instructors, an experimental process, a circulation of ideas, a traditionary teaching, and an aggregation of members, in a word, a school. Continuity, establishment, organization, are necessary to the idea of a school and a craft. In other words, if war be an art, and not a matter of haphazard and pell-mell fighting, as under the walls of Troy, it requires what is appropriately called a standing army, that is, an army which has a status . Unless we are in a happy valley, or on a sea-protected island, we must have a standing army, or we are open to hostile attack.

 But, when you have got your standing army, how are you to keep it from taking the wrong side, and turning upon you, like elephants in Eastern fights, instead of repelling your foe? Thus it was that the Pretorians, the Gothic mercenaries, the medieval Turks, and later Janizzaries, became the masters and upsetters of the Emperors, Caliphs, and Sultans who employed them. This formidable difficulty has been fatal to the military profession in popular governments, who in alarm have thrown the national defence upon the Nation, aided, as it might happen, by foreign mercenaries paid by the job. In such governments, the war department has not been the science of arms, but a political institution. An army has been raised for the occasion from off the estates and homesteads of the land, being soldiers of the soil, as rude as they were patriotic. When a danger threatened, they were summoned from plough or farm-yard, formed into a force, marched against the enemy, with whatever success in combat, and then marched home again. Which of the two would be the greater, the inconvenience or the insufficiency of such a mode of waging war? Thus we have got round again to the original dilemma of the Horse, the Stag, and the Man; the Horse destined to feel at his flanks the Man's spurs, or the Stag's horns, a Standing Army, or no profession of arms. In this difficulty, we must strike a balance and a compromise, and then get on as well as we can with a conditional Standing Army and a smattering in military science. Such has been the course adopted by England; and her insular situation, hitherto impregnable, has asked for nothing more.

 Every sovereign State will naturally feel a jealousy of the semblance of an imperium in imperio ; though not every State is in a condition to give expression to it. England has indulged that jealousy to the full, and has assumed a bearing towards the military profession much the same as she shows towards the ecclesiastical. There is indeed a close analogy between these two powers, both in themselves and in their relation to the State; and, in order to explain the position of the army in England, I cannot do better than refer to the position which in this country has been assigned to the Church. The Church and the Army are respectively the instruments of moral and material force; and are real powers in their own respective fields of operation. They necessarily have common sympathies, and an intense esprit de corps . They are in consequence the strongest supports or the most formidable opponents of the State to which they belong, and require to be subjected, beyond any mistake, to its sovereignty. In England, sensitively suspicious of combination and system, three precautions have been taken in dealing with the soldier and the parson, (I hope I may be familiar without offence), precautions borrowed from the necessary treatment of wild animals, (1) to tie him up, (2) to pare his claws, and (3) to keep him low; then he will be both safe and useful; the result is a National Church, and a Constitutional Army.

 1. In the first place, we tie both parson and soldier up, by forbidding each to form one large organization. We prohibit an organized religion and an organized force. Instead of one corporation in religion, we only allow of a multitude of small ones, as chapters and rectories, while we ignore the Establishment as a whole, deny it any legal status, and recognize the Dissenting bodies. For Universities we substitute Colleges, with rival interests, that the intellect may not be too strong for us, as is the case with some other countries; but we freely multiply local schools, for they have no political significance. And, in like manner, we are willing to perfect the discipline and appointment of regiments, but we instinctively recoil from the idea of an Army. We toast indeed "The Army," but as an abstraction, as we used to drink to "The Church," before the present substitution of "The Clergy of all denominations," which has much more of reality in it. Moreover, while, we have a real reason for sending our troops all over the world, shifting them about, using them for garrison duty, and for the defence of dependencies, we are thereby able also to divide and to hide them from each other. Nor is this all: if any organization requires a directing mind at the head of it, it is an army; but, faithful to our Constitutional instincts, we have committed its command, ex abundanti cautelâ, to as many, I believe, as five independent boards, whose concurrence is necessary for a practical result. Nay, as late occurrences have shown, we have thought it a lesser evil, that our troops should be starved in the Crimea for want of the proper officer to land the stores, and that clothing and fuel shall oscillate to and fro between Balaklava and Malta, than that there should be the chance of the smallest opening for the introduction into our political system of a power formidable to nationalism. Thus we tie up both parson and soldier.

 2. Next, in all great systems and agencies of any kind, there are certain accessories, absolutely necessary for their efficiency, yet hardly included in their essential idea. Such, to take a very small matter, is the use of the bag in making a pudding. Material edifices are no part of religion; but you cannot have religious services without them; nor can you move field-pieces without horses, nor get together horses without markets and transports. The greater part of these supplemental articles the English Constitution denies to its religious Establishment altogether, and to its Army, when not on active service. Fabrics of worship it encourages; but it gives no countenance to such ecclesiastical belongings as the ritual and ceremonial of religion, synods, religious orders, sisters of charity, missions, and the like, necessary instruments of Christian faith, which zealous Churchmen, in times of spiritual danger, decay, or promise, make vain endeavours to restore. And such in military matters are the commissariat, transport, and medical departments, which are jealously suppressed in time of peace, and hastily and grudgingly restored on the commencement of hostilities. The Constitutional spirit allows to the troops arms and ammunition, as it allows to the clergy Ordination and two sacraments, neither being really dangerous, while the supplements, which I have spoken of, are withheld. Thus it cuts their claws.

 3. And lastly, it keeps them low. Though lawyers are educated for the law, and physicians for medicine, it is felt among us to be dangerous to the Constitution to have real education either in the clerical or military profession. Neither theology nor the science of war is compatible with a national regime . Military and naval science is, in the ordinary Englishman's notion, the bayonet and the broadside. Religious knowledge comes by nature; and so far is true, that Anglican divines thump away in exhortation or in controversy, with a manliness, good sense, and good will as thoroughly John Bullish as the stubbornness of the Guards at Inkerman. Not that they are forbidden to cultivate theology in private as a personal accomplishment, but that they must not bring too much of it into the pulpit, for then they become "extreme men," Calvinists or Papists, as it may be. A general good education, a public school, and a knowledge of the classics, make a parson; and he is chosen for a benefice or a dignity, not on any abstract ground of merit, but by the great officers of State, by members of the aristocracy, and by country gentlemen, or their nominees, men who by their position are a sufficient guarantee that the nation will continually flow into the Establishment, and give it its own colour. And so of the army; it is not so many days ago that a gentleman in office assured the House of Commons (if he was correctly reported) that the best officers were those who had a University education; and I doubt not it is far better for the troops to be disciplined and commanded by good scholars than by incapables and dunces. But in each department professional education is eschewed, and it is thought enough for the functionary to be a gentleman. A clergyman is the "resident gentleman" in his parish; and no soldier must rise from the ranks, because he is not "company for gentlemen."

 Let no man call this satire, for it is most seriously said; nor have I intentionally coloured any one sentence in the parallel which I have been drawing out; nor do I speak as grumbling at things as they are; I merely want to look facts in the face. I have been exposing what I consider the weak side of our Constitution, not exactly because I want it altered, but because people should not consider it the strong side. I think it a necessary weakness; I do not see how it can be satisfactorily set right without dangerous innovations. We cannot in this world have all things as we should like to have them. Not that we should not try for the best, but we should be quite sure that we do not, like the dog in the fable, lose what we have, in attempting what we cannot have. Not that I deny that, even with a Constitution adapted for peace, British energy and pluck may not, as it has done before, win a battle, or carry through a war. But after all, reforms are but the first steps in revolution, as medicine is often a diluted poison. Enthusiasts have from time to time thought otherwise. There was Dr. Whately in 1826, who maintained that the Establishment was in degrading servitude, that it had a dog's collar round its neck, that the position of Bishops was intolerable, and that it was imperative to throw off State control, keeping the endowments [n.]. And there is the Times newspaper in 1855 which would re-organize the Army, and put it on a scientific basis, satisfactory indeed to the military critic, startling to the Constitutional politician.

 Mr. Macaulay gives us a warning from history. "The Constitution of England," he says, "was only one of a large family. In the fifteenth century, the government of Castile seems to have been as free as that of our own country. That of Arragon was, beyond all question, more so even than France; the States-General alone could impose taxes. Sweden and Denmark had Constitutions of a different description. Let us overleap two or three hundred years, and contemplate Europe at the commencement of the eighteenth century. Every free Constitution, save one, had gone down. That of England had weathered the danger, and was riding in full security. What, then, made us to differ? The progress of civilization introduced a great change. War became a science, and, as a necessary consequence, a trade. The great body of the people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconvenience of military service, and thought it better to pay others for undergoing them. That physical force which in the dark ages had belonged to the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter or any assembly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred entire to the king. The great mass of the population, destitute of all military discipline and organization, ceased to exercise any influence by force on political transactions. Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent; England escaped, but she escaped very narrowly. If Charles had played the part of Gustavus Adolphus, if he had carried on a popular war for the defence of the Protestant cause in Germany, if he had gratified the national pride by a series of victories, if he had formed an army of 40,000 or 50,000 devoted soldiers, we do not see what chance the nation would have had of escaping from despotism."

 These are very different times; but, however steady and self-righting is John Bull, however elastic his step, and vigorous his arm, I do not see how the strongest and healthiest build can overcome difficulties which lie in the very nature of things.

 And now, however circuitously, I have answered my question, "Who's to blame for the untoward events in the Crimea?" They are to blame, the ignorant, intemperate public, who clamour for an unwise war, and then, when it turns out otherwise than they expected, instead of acknowledging their fault, proceed to beat their zealous servants in the midst of the fight for not doing impossibilities.

 March, 1855.

 Note

 [I am informed that Dr. Whately never acknowledged the work here referred to as his own.]