“For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right and wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame,
Through its ocean-sundered fibres, feels the gush of joy or shame:
In the gain or loss of one race, all the rest have equal claim.”
As in this country the future race of the world is being developed, so also will the foundation of the future government be developed, which shall become universal. It was no mere child’s play or idle fancy of the old prophets, whose prophecies of a Christ who should rule the world, come trooping down the corridors of time, and from all eras converge upon this. Neither were the Jews entirely at fault when they looked for a Messiah who should reign over the world in temporal as well as in spiritual things, since it is beginning to be comprehended that a reign of justice in temporal things can only follow from the baptism of them by spirituality. And it is the approach of these heretofore widely-separated principles which is to produce the impending revolution. And that revolution will be the final and the ultimate contest between justice and authority, in which the latter will be crushed, never again to raise its despotic head among and to divide the members of a common humanity.
St. Paul said: “Faith, Hope and Charity. These three, but the greatest of these is charity.” Beautiful as this triplet may appear to be to the casualist, it cannot bear the test of analysis. It will be replaced in the vocabulary of the future by the more perfect one—Knowledge, Wisdom and Justice. These three, but the greatest of these is Justice. Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins. Justice will in the future demand perfect compensation in all things, whether material, mental or spiritual.
Heretofore justice has only been considered as having relation to matters covered by enacted law, and its demands have been considered as satisfied when the law has had its full course. With Freedom and Equality it has been a mere abstract term with but little significance. There has never been such a thing as freedom for the people. It has always been concession by the government. There has never been an equality for the people. It has always been the stronger, in some sense, preying upon the weaker; and the people have never had justice. When there is authority, whether it be of law, of custom, or of individuals, neither of these can exist except in name. Neither do these principles apply to the people in their collective capacity, but when the people’s time shall come they will belong to every individual separately. Equality will exist in freedom and be regulated by justice.
But what does freedom mean? “As free as the winds” is a common expression. But if we stop to inquire what that freedom is, we find that air in motion is under the most complete subjection to different temperatures in different localities, and that these differences arise from conditions entirely independent of the air simply as such. That is to say, the air of itself never changes its temperature. Therefore the freedom of the wind is the freedom to obey commands imposed by conditions to which it is by nature related. So also is water always free to seek its own level. But neither the air or the water of one locality obeys the commands which come from the conditions surrounding another locality. That is to say, that while air and water as a whole are subject to general laws, when individualized, each separate body must be subject to its peculiar relations, and to the law of its conditions. Water in one locality may be pure—hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen; while in others it may contain various additional elements, as sodium, calcium or ammonium, and yet each is free. Air in one locality may be twenty degrees above, and in another twenty degrees below, zero; and yet each is free in its own sphere.
Now, individual freedom in its true sense means just the same thing for the people that freedom for the air and water means to them. It means freedom to obey the natural condition of the individual, modified only by the various external forces which are brought to bear upon, and which induce action in, the individual. What that action will be, must be determined solely by the individual and the operating causes, and in no two cases can they be precisely alike; since no two human beings are precisely alike. Now, is it not plain that freedom means that individuals having the right to it, are subject only to the laws of their own being, and to the relations they sustain to the laws of other things by which they are surrounded?