Dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule Our spirits from their urns.
Their sovereignty does not come, however, from their contributions to political science.
I wish we might dwell longer on these dreams of philosophers. They offer a field for delightful study. We linger lovingly with them. How tenderly we read of the pious dream of St. Augustine for the Civitas Dei, the City of God; of a new civic order rising on the crumbling ruins of the Roman Empire. The advent of Christianity had brought into the world the auroral flush of a new moral order, a quickened sense of social duty; a warmth of human brotherhood; a heightened conscience. The church was rising like a splendid mausoleum over the sepulcher of its founder. The world thrilled with an emotion never felt before. What more natural than that a new social order should arise, into which should be gathered all classes of men, glorified, purified, ready for the Advent of the conquering Galilean, which was then almost universally anticipated. But alas, the Augustine City of God has never come. It will never come as a political organization. Its home is in the human heart. It is not Lo here or Lo there; and cometh not with observation. The City of God, the City of Light, will come when ethical conscience is so quickened that law becomes love, and love, law.
We might go on and say more of the exalted dreamers who from age to age have attempted the impossible task of idealizing the State by geometric rules or fantastic theories. Perhaps the two most notable—at least until the recent expansion of Socialistic propaganda—were the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More and the "New Atlantis" of Lord Bacon. We must dismiss them by naming them. They lacked the Democratic Ideal. Yet, among the many gems which Lord Bacon has given to our language, the short terse phrases, which make him one of the most quotable of authors, is one memorable line in his "New Atlantis." He said of the Father of Solomon's house, "He had an aspect as though he pitied men." Benignant and blessed thought.
One, however, of the world's intellectual sovereigns, who lived in the uplands of the imagination, who traversed the gamut of human experience, and of whom we may say, if of any man, "He saw life steadily and saw it whole;" in dealing with the relation of man to the civic order, never indulged in illusion—William Shakespeare. It has often been said to his reproach that his dramas are not instinct with the spirit of liberty; that he believed in the right of the strongest to rule; that he deified strength and power; that he showed contempt for the mob and "rabblement." We cannot go into a discussion of this interesting matter. We must remember, however—a fact that is often overlooked—that Shakespeare was not only most extraordinary as a poet, but that he was one of the profoundest moralists that the world has known. His genius was supremely sane, calm, judicial, healthy. He painted men and women as they are. His nobly poised intellect and acute vision saw the realities of life. He knew the exalted possibilities of spiritual excellence to which humanity can rise, and the abysmal depths into which it can sink. He recognized the fact that society is swayed by selfish interests oftener than by a devotion to high ideals. He read history with a microscopic eye. Dowden, one of his most acute interpreters, says, "Shakespeare studied and represented in his art the world which lay before him. If he prophesied the future it was not in the ordinary manner of prophets, but only by completely embodying the present, in which the future was concerned." In his day the mob had not learned self-control, moral dignity, a discrimination between the transient and permanent in politics. Has it learned this lesson yet? His immortal works exhibit no world-weariness, no blasé pessimism. He saw the eternal relations of cause and effect. He admired the intellectual powers and tremendous personalities of great historical characters like Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Richard III, but he also saw their limitations, moral delinquencies and weaknesses which led inevitably to the snares into which they fell. He had a profound sympathy with human life; he was a lover of rectitude, nobility of character, self-sacrifice, manliness, womanliness. Above all, he taught the everlasting and all embracing equity with which the universe throbs. In the end, no cheat, no lie, no injustice prospers. The sinner is a self-punisher. At last, by action of the inexorable, inescapable moral order, "the wheel is come full circle;" evil is strangled.
To such an equitable intellect, the idea of a Platonic Republic or Bacon's "New Atlantis" would be as impossible as impracticable. He knew too well the plasticity of human adjustments, the shifting, fleeting, rising and sinking of the social order, the possibilities of disturbance and recoil that ever lie at the core of a placid and smug order of things, to attempt any speculative panacea for the evils of society. He laid open the tap-root of all institutions and happenings—the human heart.
All this is a digression, but a strange fascination invests the name of Shakespeare. Thackeray said of the insanity of Dean Swift, "So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." So when we talk of Shakespeare, it almost seems that we are talking of collective humanity. He was no economic idealist; he built no systems of philosophy of law. He understood humanity. In spite of all criticisms, his view of life followed more closely than the pretentious systems of closet philosophers, the gleam of the Democratic Ideal—progression and growth.
We may consider government, or rather the social organism, as a working basis on which men manage to live together, receiving from and giving to each other protection for life and property. There is a noble phrase of Edmund Burke—he was a master of noble phrases—"moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race." In order to have any basis on which human beings could live together, there must have been a moulding together of immense diversities. Human nature and human society are tremendously complex. No two persons are just alike; and each personality is a bundle of contradictory qualities. Government rests upon two forces, sovereignty and obedience. Somebody must command; somebody must obey. Each of these forces is powerfully operative in most men. The love of authority, dominion, power, the will to make another to do our bidding, is deeply planted in the human nature. Nothing is more intoxicating, more enjoyable, than power. On the other hand, the principle of submission, compliance, obedience, is a stronger force than most of us imagine.
We need not analyze the genesis of the force that has kept men under government. There are almost as many theories as there are inquirers. It has been said to be compulsion, physical force by one school of writers; by another school, agreement, a contractual relation. For many generations a popular theory was that authority is given to rulers by God, or the eternal reason; this theory cost King Charles I his head. Another school contends that it rests upon some psychological principle inherent in human character. There may be a vast practical difference in results, if some of these theories are pushed to the limit; but that there must be sovereignty in the state, however derived, and obedience to such sovereignty by the citizen, is plain, if anarchy is to be escaped.
If we may use the phrase which Herbert Spencer coined and popularized, men naturally follow "the line of the least resistance;" and to obey, except where obedience is counter to self-interest, or where, in the more highly specialized civilizations, it would violate rights, honor, duty, is generally the easy course. The Castle of Indolence seldom has any vacant rooms. The exceptionally strong will, the "monarch mind," is rare. The principle of obedience to authority is strongly developed in the race, especially among nations where the supreme power is supposed to rest upon some religious sanction, as was the case with European governments until recent years, and as is the case with most Oriental nations to-day.