Independence Day

by Unknown

“The only way,” said Burlamaqui, “to attain to the knowledge of that natural law is to consider attentively the nature and constitution of man, the relations he has to the beings that surround him, and the states from thence resulting. In fact, the very term of natural law and the notion we have given of it, show that the principles of this science must be taken from the very nature and constitution of man.”

Men naturally, he said, draw together to form societies for mutual protection and advantage. Their natural state is a state of union and society, and these societies are merely for the common advantage of all of the members.

This was certainly a very simple proposition, but it had required centuries to bring men’s minds back to it; and it was not altogether safe to put forth because it implied that each community existed for the benefit of itself, for the benefit of its members, and not for the benefit of a prince or another nation, or for the church, or for an empire.

It was a principle quickly seized upon by the Americans as soon as their difficulties began in 1764. In their early debates and discussions we hear a great deal about a “state of nature,” which at first seems rather meaningless to us. But it was merely their attempt to apply to themselves the fundamental principles of the Reformation. Were the colonies by the exactions and remodeling of the mother-country thrown into that “state of nature,” where they could reorganize society afresh, on the basis of their own advantage? How much severity or how much oppression or dissatisfaction would bring about this state of nature? Was there any positive rule by which you could decide? Patrick Henry, who was always very eloquent on the subject, declared that the boundary had been passed; that the colonies were in a state of nature.

Any one who is at all familiar with the trend of thought for the last hundred years can readily see how closely this idea of going back to natural causes and first conceptions for the discovery of political principles is allied to every kind of modern progress; to the modern study of natural history, the study of the plants and animals in their natural environment, instead of by preconceived scholastic theories; the study of the human body by dissection instead of by supposition; the study of heat, light, electricity, the soil, the rocks, the ocean, the stars by actual observation, without regard to what the Scriptures and learned commentators had to say.

A large part of the American colonists were very far advanced in all the ideas of the Reformation. Burlamaqui’s book, applying to politics and government, these free and wonderful principles, came to a large number of them as the most soul-stirring and mind-arousing message they had ever heard. It has all become trite enough to us; but to them it was fresh and marvelous. Their imaginations seized on it with the indomitable energy and passion which the climate inspired, and some who breathed the air of Virginia and Massachusetts were on fire with enthusiasm.

“This state of nature,” argued Burlamaqui, “is not the work of man, but established by divine institution.”

“Natural society is a state of equality and liberty; a state in which all men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other power but God. For every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another person’s authority by a particular convention.”

Here we find coupled with liberty that word equality which played such a tremendous part in history for the succeeding hundred years. And we must bear in mind that what the people of that time meant by it was political equality, equality of rights, equality before the law and the government; and not equality of ability, talents, fortunes, or gifts, as some have fancied.

Burlamaqui not only found liberty, independence, and equality growing out of nature itself; but he argued that all this was part of the divine plan, the great order of nature and the universe. Indeed, that was what he and his Reformation predecessors had set out to discover, to unravel the system of humanity, to see if there really was a system that could be gathered from the actual plain facts; and to see also if there was a unity and completeness in this system.