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liberately clogged every wheel and weakened every spring which could give efficiency and vigor to their united strength.

And thus must it ever be with individuals and with States, who, accepting a principle, refuse to accept its consequences. For it is no less sure that every general law of being will sooner or later work itself fully out, than that all society is founded upon law. The law of union is eminently a law of sacrifice. The sacrifice of something that you might freely do while living alone, becomes an imperative condition the moment that you undertake to live with another. And as, in every State, each town, while performing some of the functions of government for itself, and possessing all the machinery which the performance of them required, looked to the State government for the performance of other functions, and cheerfully submitted to the curtailment of municipal authority and the partial subordination which such relations towards the State required; so was it only by the sacrifice of certain rights that the States could build up a central power strong enough to perform for them those indispensable acts of general government which they could not perform for themselves.

Manifest as this truth may now appear to every understanding, the history of the civil government of the Revolution is in a great measure the history of a persistent and bitter struggle with it in almost

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was won.

THE STATE GOVERNMENTS.

all its practical applications. Step by step the ground was contested, - step by step the ground Yet how many steps were still required to bring our fathers to the Constitution which made us a powerful nation! How many more must yet be taken, before we reach the full consequences of that sublime Declaration which made us an independent people!

LECTURE V.

FINANCES OF THE REVOLUTION.

N the sketches which formed the subject of my

IN

last two Lectures, you doubtless observed that I confined myself to general views and statements, without attempting to enter into a full study of any of the various classes of acts which statesmen are called upon to perform. This evening I propose to give you a fuller view of Congress in action; and in action upon one of the most complex and difficult subjects of legislation. Resistance once resolved on, it became necessary to provide the means of rendering it effective. There were men enough in the country to fill up the army, there was money enough in the country to feed, pay, and clothe them; but how were these men and that money to be reached? We shall see hereafter what was done to bring out the physical resources of the country, and how unwisely it was done. This evening I shall confine myself to a review of the efforts which were made earnestly and persistently, from the beginning of the war to the end of it, to bring out its pecuniary resources.

And here, on the threshold, let me remind you that, in all historical studies, you should still bear in mind the difference between the point of view from which you look at events, and that from which they were seen by the actors themselves. We all act under the influence of ideas. Even those who speak of theories with contempt are none the less the unconscious disciples of some theory, none the less busied in working out some problems of the great theory of life. Much as they fancy that they differ from the speculative man, they differ from him only in contenting themselves with seeing the path as it lies at their feet, while he strives to embrace it all, starting-point and end, in one comprehensive view. And thus in looking back upon the past we are irresistibly led to arrange the events of history, as we arrange the facts of a science, in their appropriate classes and under their respective laws. And thus, too, these events give us the true measure of the intellectual and moral culture of the times, of the extent to which just ideas prevailed therein upon all the duties and functions of private and public life. Tried by the standard of absolute truth and right, grievously would they all fall short, and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth, the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man of the mote, we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much also in which we can sincerely rejoice.

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In judging, therefore, the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their own age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of ours. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clew to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and started ideas which, once at work in the mind, could never rest till they had evolved momentous truths and overthrown long-standing errors. no one had yet seen (Adam Smith's great work was just going to the press), that labor was the original source of every form of wealth, — that the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, were all equally the instruments of national prosperity, or demonstrated as Smith does, that nations grow rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is the good of all. (The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their terrible energy the universal dissatisfaction with past and present, the universal

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