We have been driven back to the loftiest ground on this question. We have found that only on that could we stand. When the very foundations of what we held most awful and reverential have been assailed by mad traitorous hands, as though they were vulgar things, when frenzied self-will has laid its profane grasp upon the Ark of the Covenant, we have been forced back to those strong foundations on which nations stand, for hope and confidence, to those tremendous sanctions that girdle in, as with the fires of God, the sanctity of Law, the majesty of Order, and established Right. We have declared these things Divine. We have said men administer truly, but men did not create, and men have no right to destroy. We arise in the defence of institutions of which Jehovah has made us the guardians for men!
We have said the Nation exists to train men, that the best nation is the one that trains the best men. Let us see how it does this.
In the first place, it educates by Written Law. To be sure, laws are passed to define and protect human rights, in person, purse, family, or good name. People sometimes think that is all they do. But consider. These laws on the Statute Book are the Nation's deliberate convictions, so far, on right and wrong, a real code of morals, the decisions of the national conscience on moral subjects. An act is passed punishing theft. It is intended to protect property indeed, but it does more. It stands there, the Nation's conviction on a point of ethics. Theft is absolutely wrong. It passes another act punishing perjury. The mere lawyer looks at this solely as a facility for getting at the truth before a jury. It is vastly more. It is a moral decision. The Nation binds the Ten Commandments on the popular conscience, and declares, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness.' It declares, 'There are everlasting distinctions, things absolutely right, and things absolutely wrong. So far has the conscience of the Nation made things clear. The good citizen knows all this without the Statute Book, and much more. But there must be a limit somewhere. Here it is. Up to this point you may come, but no farther. Everlasting distinctions must be taught by bolts, chains, and scaffolds, if there are those in the Nation who will learn them from no other teachers.'
It has been very easy to tamper with Law among ourselves, very easy to try experiments. And people get the notion that Law is a mere human affair, the act of a legislature, the will of a majority. It is all a mistake. A Nation's living laws are the slow growth of ages. They are its solemn convictions on wrongs and rights, written in its heart. The business of a wise legislator is to help all those convictions to expression in formal enactment. Meddling fools try to choke them, pass acts against them even, think they can annihilate such convictions. One day the convictions insist on being heard, if not by formal law, then by terrible informal protest against some legalized wrong. Think how laboriously lawmakers have toiled to prevent the expression of the Nation's determined convictions on the subject of Slavery! Think of the end! Nay, all enactments which accord with these deep decisions of the National Conscience, which help them to better expression and clearer acknowledgment, are the real Laws of the Land. All that oppose these decisions, though passed by triumphant majorities, with loud jubilation, and fastened on the Nation as its sense of right, are mere rubbish, sure to be swept away as the waves of the National life roll on.
We, by no means, hold that even the best nation, in its most living laws, always declares perfect truth and perfect right. Human errors and weaknesses enter into all things with which men deal. And the Nation is ordered and guided by men. Nevertheless the Nation is an authorized teacher of morals, and these errors are the accidents of the institution. They are not of its essence. So far as they exist, they block its working, they stand in its way. Pure, clear Justice is the perfect ideal toward which a living, advancing Nation aims. That it daily come nearer this ideal is the basis of its permanence. And, meanwhile, though the result be far from attained, we none the less hold that the Law of the Nation is, to every man within it, the Law of God. His business, as a wise man, is to accept it, obey it, help it to amendment where he believes there is error, with all patience and loyalty.
For the first disorder in the makeup of man is wilfulness. The child kicks and scratches in his cradle. It wants to have its own small will. The first lesson it has to learn is the lesson of submission, that the untried world, into which it is thrust, is not a place of self-pleasing but of law. It takes parents and teachers years to get that fact through the stubborn youngster's head. It will burn its fingers, it will tumble down stairs, it will pitch head first over fences, because it will not learn to forego its own small, ignorant will, and submit to wiser and larger wills. In the good old days they used to think that matter ought to be learned in childhood once for all, and they labored faithfully to convince us urchins, by the unsparing logic of the rod, that the law of life is not self-will. Some of us, possibly, remember those emphatic lessons yet.
It is hard, however, to learn this thing perfectly. And so after the Mother, Father, and Teacher get through, the Nation takes up the lesson. A wise, wide, unselfish will takes command, and puts down the narrow, conceited, selfish will of the individual. The individual will may think itself very wise and very right. But the large will, the broad, strong, wise will of the Nation, comes and says: 'Here is the Law, the embodiment of the great, wide, wise will, to which the wisest and the strongest must submit and bow.'
That is the law of human position. Not self-will but obedience, not anarchy but order, not mad uncontrolledness, but calm submission, even to temporary error and wrong, is the road to ultimate perfection. Therefore, we can say nothing too reverential of Law. We cannot guard too jealously the clear trumpet-tongued preacher of everlasting right, sounding out a great Nation's convictions of obligation and duty. Hedge its sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land for right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling, therefore, with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred Majesty of the Nation's settled Order.
But the Written Law is only one way in which the Nation brings its teachings home to the individual. It is not the strongest way. The Nation's most powerful formative influence lies in its traditions, its unwritten law, its sense and feeling about the questions of human life and conduct, handed down from father to son in the continuity of the national life. And the power to hand these down depends on the fact that the Nation is a living organism.
For examine, and you will find every nation has a power to mould men after a certain model. We are Americans because we have been made so by the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a certain type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans. Greece took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England has the artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown up creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same power, and manufactures the Frenchman.