THE REFORMATION—THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT.
The Reformation, like the American Revolution, was originated and conducted to successful issue by wise, good and practical men, whose intuitive judgments and sagacious instincts enabled them to feel their way through the difficulties that environed them. Wise men know that there is too much of complexity in the tangled web of human affairs, to justify the attempt at once to practice and philosophise, to act and to reason. Fools and philosophers too often mar the good works of such men, by pretending to see clearly, and to define accurately, the principles of action which have led to those works. A Washington, a Peel, or a Wellington, never "writes himself down an ass" by appealing to abstract principles to justify measures which are rendered necessary by a thousand minute and peculiar circumstances of the hour, which common sense and experience instinctively appreciate, but which philosophy in vain attempts to detect or to generalize. Common sense never attempts "to expel nature," but suggests and carries through a thousand useful reforms by recurrence to and comparison with the past, and by cautious experimentation.
Common sense sometimes errs by excess of conservation; but it is better to err with Pope, who thought "Whatever is, is right," than with Jefferson, whose every act and word proves that he held that "Whatever is, is wrong.
The Reformation was not the thought and the act of Luther, Calvin, Cranmer and Erasmus; but the thought and the act of society—the vox Populi, vox Dei. Popes and cardinals are not infallible, but society is. Its harmony is its health; and to differ with it is heresy or treason, because social discord inflicts individual misery; and what disturbs and disarranges society, impairs the happiness and well-being of its members.
This doctrine of the infallibility of society, is suggested, though not expressed, in the maxim—Salus populi, est suprema lex. The Puritans, in the early days of New England, acted it out; and if they hung a few troublesome old women, the good that they achieved was more than compensated for by any errors they may have committed. Liberty of the press, liberty of speech, freedom of religion, or rather freedom from religion, and the unlimited right of private judgment, have borne no good fruits, and many bad ones. Infidels, Skeptics, Millerites, Mormons, Agrarians, Spiritual Rappers, Wakemanites, Free Negroes and Bloomers, disturb the peace of society, threaten the security of property, offend the public sense of decency, assail religion, and invoke anarchy. Society has the right, and is in duty bound, to take care of itself; and when public opinion becomes powerless, law should intervene, and punish all acts, words, or opinions, which have become criminal by becoming dangerous or injurious.
We would rejoice to see intolerance of error revived in New England. Laxity of rule and laxity of public opinion is sin of itself, and leads to thousands of sins. New England is culpable for permitting Parker and Beecher to stir up civil discord and domestic broils from the pulpit. These men deserve punishment, for they have instigated and occasioned a thousand murders in Kansas; yet they did nothing more than carry into practice the right of private judgment, liberty of speech, freedom of the press and of religion. These boasted privileges have become far more dangerous to the lives, the property and the peace of the people of this Union, than all the robbers and murderers and malefactors put together.
The Reformation was but an effort of Nature—the vis medicatrix naturæ—throwing off what was false, vicious, or superfluous, and retaining what was good.
The great men of the day but show larger portions of the common thought. Men, and all other social and gregarious animals, have a community of thought, of motions, instincts and intuitions. The social body is of itself a thinking, acting, sentient being. This is eminently observable with the lower animals. Bees and herds perform their evolutions with too much rapidity and precision, to leave any doubt but that one mind and one feeling, either from within or without, directs their movements. The great error of modern philosophy is the ignorance or forgetfulness of this fact. The first departure from it was not the Reformation—for that was preëminently a social idea and a social movement;—but the doctrine of the right of private judgment, which speculative philosophers and vain schismatics attempted to engraft upon it, or deduce from it. Human equality, the social contract, the let-alone and selfish doctrines of political economy, universal liberty, freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion, spring directly from this doctrine, or are only new modes of expressing it. Agrarianism, Free Love, and No Government, are its logical sequences: for the right to judge for ourself implies the right to act upon our judgments, and that can never be done in a world where the private appropriation of all capital, and the interference of government, restricts our free agency, and paralyzes our action on all sides.
We sometimes think the burning of the Alexandrian Library was a providential purification, just as the fictitious burning, by Cervantes, of Don Quixote's library ridded the world of the useless rubbish of the Middle Ages, by the ridicule so successfully attached to it. Sure we are, that a fire that would consume all the theological and other philosophical speculations of the last two centuries, would be a happy God-send.
Our Revolution, so wise in its conception and so glorious in its execution, was the mere assertion by adults of the rights of adults, and had nothing more to do with philosophy than the weaning of a calf. It was the act of a people seeking national independence, not the Utopian scheme of speculative philosophers, seeking to establish human equality and social perfection.
But the philosophers seized upon it, as they had upon the Reformation, and made it the unwilling and unnatural parent of the largest and most hideous brood of ills that had ever appeared at one birth, since the opening of the box of Pandora. Bills of Rights, Acts of Religious Freedom and Constitutions, besprinkled with doctrines directly at war with all stable government, seem to be the basis on which our institutions rest. But only seem to be; for, in truth, our laws and government are either old Anglo-Saxon prescriptive arrangements, or else the gradual accretions of time, circumstance and necessity. Throw our paper platforms, preambles and resolutions, guaranties and constitutions, into the fire, and we should be none the worse off, provided we retained our institutions—and the necessities that begat, and have, so far, continued them.
All government proceeds ab extra. Neither individuals nor societies can govern themselves, any more than the mouse can live in the exhausted receiver, or the clown lift himself by the lappel of his pantaloons. The South is governed by the necessity of keeping its negroes in order, which preserves a healthy conservative public opinion. Had the negroes votes, the necessity would be removed, because the interest of the governing class would cease to be conservative. The necessity, the governing power ab extra, would be removed. The little republics of ancient Greece were able to preserve the most artificial social arrangements, under the necessities which slavery and foreign hostile pressure from without begat. They were afraid of change, because insurrection was dangerous.
If government on paper were really useless and harmless, we should say nothing about it. But it is fraught with danger, first because we are apt to rely on it for safety and security of rights, and secondly because it rarely suits the occasion. Men and societies are endowed by Providence generally with sufficient knowledge and judgment to act correctly or prudently under circumstances as they arise; but they cannot foresee or provide for the future, nor lay down rules for other people's conduct. All platforms, resolutions, bills of rights and constitutions, are true in the particular, false in the general. Hence all legislation should be repealable, and those instruments are but laws. Fundamental principles, or the higher law, are secrets of nature which God keeps to himself. The vain attempt of "frequent recurrence to them," is but the act of the child who builds card houses, for the pleasure of knocking them down. Recurrence to fundamental principles and appeals to the higher law, are but the tocsin of revolution that may upset everything, but which will establish nothing, because no two men are agreed as to what the higher law, alias "fundamental principles," is.
Moses, and Lycurgus, and Solon, and Numa, built their institutions to last, enjoined it on the people never to change them, and threw around them the sanctity of religion, to ward off the sacrilegious hand of future innovation. "A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles," and the kicking down of card houses, was not part of their science of government. We have often thought, that of all the lost arts, the art of government was the only one whose loss we would deplore, or whose recovery is worth the pains of study and research.
To us it seems that "first causes," "fundamental principles," and the "higher law," mean one and the same thing: An "ignis fatuus," that it is dangerous to pursue, and hopeless to overtake.
We may be doing Mr. Jefferson injustice, in assuming that his "fundamental principles" and Mr. Seward's "higher law," mean the same thing; but the injustice can be very little, as they both mean just nothing at all, unless it be a determination to inaugurate anarchy, and to do all sorts of mischief. We refer the reader to the chapter on the "Declaration of Independence," &c., in our Sociology, for a further dissertation on the fundamental powder-cask abstractions, on which our glorious institutions affect to repose. We say affect, because we are sure neither their repose nor their permanence would be disturbed by the removal of the counterfeit foundation.
The true greatness of Mr. Jefferson was his fitness for revolution. He was the genius of innovation, the architect of ruin, the inaugurator of anarchy. His mission was to pull down, not to build up. He thought everything false as well in the physical, as in the moral world. He fed his horses on potatoes, and defended harbors with gun-boats, because it was contrary to human experience and human opinion. He proposed to govern boys without the authority of masters or the control of religion, supplying their places with Laissez-faire philosophy, and morality from the pages of Lawrence Sterne. His character, like his philosophy, is exceptional—invaluable in urging on revolution, but useless, if not dangerous, in quiet times.
We would not restrict, control, or take away a single human right or liberty, which experience showed was already sufficiently governed and restricted by public opinion. But we do believe that the slaveholding South is the only country on the globe, that can safely tolerate the rights and liberties which we have discussed.
The annals of revolutionary Virginia were illustrated by three great and useful men. The mighty mind of Jefferson, fitted to pull down; the plastic hand of Madison to build up, and the powerful arm of Washington to defend, sustain and conserve.
We are the friend of popular government, but only so long as conservatism is the interest of the governing class. At the South, the interests and feelings of many non-property holders, are identified with those of a comparatively few property holders. It is not necessary to the security of property, that a majority of votes should own property; but where the pauper majority becomes so large as to disconnect the mass of them in feeling and interest from the property holding class, revolution and agrarianism are inevitable. We will not undertake to say that events are tending this way at the North. The absence of laws of entail and primogeniture may prevent it; yet we fear the worst; for, despite the laws of equal inheritance and distribution, wealth is accumulating in few hands, and pauperism is increasing. We shall attempt hereafter to show that a system of very small entails might correct this tendency.