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to this Homer's evident attempt to present the idea of some purer Zeus of great antiquity, as in the Dodonaan invocation before cited, and we are carried back beyond the turbid epochs of the Hellenian, Dorian, and Ionian genealogies, into the Pelasgic times. Thence we easily pass to the Javanic (if they are not really names of one and the same early migration), and so on, until we come within the outer borders of that primitive circle of light-that early conception of the divine, and of the divine government, given to us in the book of Genesis, with its sublime announcement of the God who "in the beginning created the Heavens and the Earth."

This was the primitive revelation which contained the germinal ideas of all subsequent revelations, while Mythology, and the Natural Religion of the philosopher, have both been departures from it-the one from its purity, the other from its life-the one, an ever-growing darkness and deformity, the other, avoiding grossness, indeed, but preserving only an abstract, empty form of truth-a pale, thin, ghostly image, without the power, and life, and burning glory, of the primitive idea.

There is no mythology that is not more suggestive, more inspiring, more ennobling, than a dead materialism. Reverence may make us hesitate to bring into the comparison the Jehovah of the Scriptures, but we need not fear to say that we had better believe even in the Zeus of Homer, than in the Nous of Anaxagoras, or that "god of forces," which is all that is left to us in such a theism as that of Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin.

ART. II. THE SPHERE OF CIVIL LAW IN SOCIAL

REFORM.

By Prof. JOHN BASCOM, Williams' College, Mass.

We can not of course, in briefly discussing the sphere of civil law in social reform, lay down explicit rules, capable of certain and easy application to all the shifting circumstances of different social states. The effort to do it would show a very partial and inadequate conception of the variety and complexity of causes that enter into each distinct social problem, and effect its practical solution. We can only hope to bring before the eye, a little more clearly, a few of the land-marks of general principles, by which the course of safe and wise action is to be directed. The complex questions of society, while receiving great light from general inquiries, demand, in each application to specific cases of the conclusions of science, a wide and thorough estimate of the exact conditions under which the hoped-for results are sought. We shall thus be saved, on the one hand, from a contemptuous arrest of principles as purely speculative, the moment we enter on practice, and, on the other, from that rigid and precipitate application of them that gives no weight to the causes at work to retard or modify their action.

In entering a harbor, whose channels are complicated and narrow, whose shoals are many and shifting, we need, not only an accurate chart of the water-courses, but also an equally careful estimate of the effects of each state of the tide. The permanent and the variable elements together, determine our safety or our danger.

Men have two distinct circles of life-an interior, or individual one, an exterior, or social one. While, on the one side, we must have the individual before we can have society; on the other, we must have society before we can have any mature individual life. Each bud of a tree is an individual, while the tree itself is a community of individuals. The height, the breadth, the proportions, the flower, the fruit. which belong to the species, can be reached only through

the joint growth of many buds. The trunk, the united labor of all, lifts them aloft, while the branches, the result of divided and interdependent labors, bear each to its own portion of sunshine, and to its own office as leaf-bud or fruitbud.

Society is as essential to men as the tree to its branches. Life is no more independent life in the one case than in the other. If, then, there were any conflict, general and inherent, between the wants of the individual and those of the community, the case would be hopeless, since neither could be sacrificed to the other without the loss of both.

There is no such conflict, yet the harmony of the two is reached in a way different from that sometimes stated. There is no perfect, attainable harmony between man and manbetween man and the community, save through his moral nature. Let each selfishly, immorally pursue his own ends, and on the basis of interest alone, there is no harmony attainable except that of conflict-such an adjustment, or harmony, if you can so call it, as is reached in the insect world by prolific fecundity on the one side, and ravenous feeding on the other. Men would be divided against each other; the master against the servant, the capitalist against the laborer, the buyer against the seller, without hope of ultimate concord, were it not for the moral nature, the moral obligations and affections of both parties. The interests of men are found in final analysis to be concordant, because they are the interests of moral beings.

The lower laws of simple and pure economic action can not by and of themselves, secure the harmony of concord, can not build society up by the profit and enlargement of each of its members. We may not pause upon this point further than to indicate one or two of the facts which sustain the assertion. It is my moral nature that makes the independent prosperity of others acceptable to me. As a selfish being, as a master merely, I prefer their subjection to myself. It is in view of its effects on the moral nature of my employé, that I am willing as a capitalist that the gains of our joint undertaking shall be divided on liberal principles between us. Were it not for the inexhaustible capacity in

him of higher manhood, and my satisfaction therein, and hope therefrom, I should treat him, as far as I was able to do so, as I treat the brute, feeding it to the point of highest productiveness and no further. It is nothing but my moral nature that can ever induce me to cheerfully yield an advantage that I have over another, and nothing but his moral nature can lead me to hope in the future an advantage from such a concession. All the ideal pictures of the harmony of society in the prosperity of each of its individuals, can only be reached by the action of moral forces. The shaft may revolve in the pit, and the machinery that fills the upper floors remain still forever, without the belting that binds the two. The wheels of labor will move in vain unless moral affections are found to unite them to the prosperity of society, and maintain in quiet and successful interplay the complex mechanism of social life. First, then, the whole field is one preeminently of morals, and not simply of economy, political or otherwise.

In this social field whose harmony must be that of moral forces, ruling with and over interested impulses, whose life, like that of each person in it, must be a moral life, the question arises, what are the claims of society as compared with those of its separate members. This inquiry must be answered unhesitatingly: they are supreme. Society may do for itself all that it is desirable should be done, and all that can be done. Its wants and powers are the only limits of its rights. The individual can set up no barrier against society. However great the rights of one member, the aggregate rights of all members must be greater. We can not prevent the amount from being larger than any one of the sums which go to compose it, how large soever this may be. The prosperity of a single person can not be allowed to straiten the interests of all, the general prosperity, so long as this common weal is the very trunk that bears as branches every private good. Society, then, in deciding on its joint action, has only to consider what is truly serviceable to itself, and within the scope of its means. The ancients, Greek and Roman, were not at fault in bowing the individual to the state, but only in their judgment of what the state itself requires.

At this point, important limits have been developed by the experience and discoveries of later times. The first of these is a clear apprehension that the welfare of the state includes that of each citizen; that the liberty of the citizen can not be trespassed on and the general weal be preserved. It is, then, not by opposed, but by included claims; not by separate, but by joint rights; not as a single person, but as one of the many whose well-being is under discussion, that the liberty of the citizen sets limits to civil law. It is seen to be the office of civil law to nurse liberty, not to crush it; to secure the aggregate good though the good of each part, and to find in the limits of individual prosperity the limits of the common weal. This greater identification of public with private interests, this recognition of the representative power of each citizen by which he stands a type of every other citizen, and thus of the state itself, presents the first great restriction on the arbitrary action of society. Tyrannical enactments, violent interference, vexatious regulations, a substitution of joint action for individual enterprise, have been discovered not to be serviceable to the community, because not so generally to the parties of which it is composed. It has thus become more and more the purpose of the state to establish limits around its citizens which shall furnish the most protection and the least restraint; and this, not because it does not dare to draw nearer individual liberty, but because it can not otherwise conserve the general liberty. All that enervates the citizen, enervates the state, and therefore the highest individual freedom and responsibility compatible with general advancement should be the law of action to the state. This principle will prescribe different statutes at different times. More can be trusted at one time and to one type of national character, than at another time and to another type. Not to let the individual citizen do what he can well do, is unnecessary interference-is tyranny; to leave with him what ought to be done, and what he can not or will not do, is inexcusable negligence-is imbecility.

A second limitation of civil law, increasingly comprehended as the years advance, is that imposed by the presence of natural laws covering the field of proposed legisla

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