"Tickets" printed on paper whose colour indicates the party which has issued it, are the most common things; and, in the place of my residence, it happened some years ago that party feeling ran to an unusual height, so much so that, in order to prevent melancholy consequences, the leaders came to an agreement. It consisted in this: that alternate hours should be assigned to the two parties, during which the citizens of one party only should vote. This This open defeat of the ballot was carried out readily and in good faith.

The constitution of the United States, and those of all the states, provide that the houses of the legislatures shall keep their journals, and that on the demand of a certain, not very large, number of members, the ayes and noes shall be recorded. The ayes and noes have some. times a remarkable effect. It is recorded of Philip the Fourth, of Spain,' that he asked the opinion of his council on a certain subject. The opinion was unanimously adverse, whereupon the monarch ordered every counsellor to send in his vote signed with his name, and every vote turned out to be in favour of the proposed measure. The ayes and noes have unfortunately sometimes a similar effect with us. Still, this peculiar voting may operate upon the fearful as often beneficially as otherwise; at any rate the Americans believe that it is proper thus to oblige members to make their vote known to the people.

We never give the executive the right of dissolving the legislature.

We have never closed the list of the states composing the Union, in which we differ from most other confedederacies, ancient or modern; we admit freely those who

Coxe's Memoirs of the Bourbons in Spain.

are foreigners by birth to our citizenship, and we do not believe in inalienable allegiance.

8

We allow, as it has been seen already, no attainder of blood.

We allow no ex post facto laws.

American liberty contains, as one of its characteristic elements, the enacted or written constitution. This feature distinguishes it especially from the English polity with its accumulative constitution.

We do not allow our legislatures to be politically 'omnipotent," as, theoretically at least, the British parliament is.9

I may add perhaps, as a feature of American liberty, that the American impeachment is, as I have stated before, a political, and not a penal institution. scems to me that I am borne out in this view by the Federalist.10

It

The character of the English, and of our allegiance, is treated at length in the Political Ethics. I there took the ground, that even English allegiance is a national one, whatever the language of the law books may be to the contrary. The following may serve as a farther proof that English allegiance, after all, is dissoluble. It appears from the New England charter, granted by James I., that he claimed, or had the right "to put a person out of his allegiance and protection." Page 16, Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth, &c., Boston, 1836.

9 For the English reader, I would add that the following works ought to be studied or consulted on this subject:-The Constitution of the United States, and the Constitutions of the different States, which are published from time to time, collected in one volume; the Debates on the Federal Constitution; the Federalist, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay; the Writings of Chief-Justice Marshall, Boston, 1839; Mr. Justice Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States; Mr. Calhoun's and Mr. Webster's works; Mr. Rawle's work on the Constitution, and Mr. Frederic Grimke's Considerations upon the Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions, Cincinnati, 1848.

10 No. LXV.

CHAPTER XXII.

IN WHAT CIVIL LIBERTY CONSISTS, PROVED BY
CONTRARIES.

I HAVE endeavoured to give a sketch of Anglican liberty. It is the liberty we prize and love for a hundred reasons, and which we would love if there were no other reason than that it is liberty. We know that it is the political state most befitting to conscious man, and history, as well as our own pregnant times, proves to us the value of those guarantees; their necessity, if we wish to see our political dignity secure, and their effect upon the stability of government as well as on the energies of the people. We are proud of our self-government and our love of the law as our master, and we cling the faster to all these ancient and modern guarantees, the more we observe that, wherever the task which men have proposed to themselves is the suppression of liberty, these guarantees are sure to be the first objects of determined and persevering attack. It is instructive for the friend of freedom to observe how uniformly and instinctively the despots of all ages and countries have been in their attacks upon the different guarantees enumerated in the preceding pages. We can learn much in all practical matters by the rule of contraries. As the arithmetician As the arithmetician proves his multiplication by division, and his subtraction by addition, so may we learn what those who love liberty ought to prize, by observing what those who hate freedom suppress or war against. This process is made peculiarly easy as well as interesting at this very period, when the

government of a large nation is avowedly engaged in suppressing all liberty, and in establishing the most uncompromising monarchical absolutism.

I do not know a single guarantee contained in the foregoing pages, which might not be accompanied by a long historical commentary showing how necessary it is, from the fact that it has been attacked by those who are plainly and universally acknowledged as having oppressed liberty, or as having been, at least, guilty of the inchoate crime. It is a useful way to turn the study of history to account, especially for the youth of free nations. It turns their general ardour to distinct realities, and furnishes the student with confirmations by facts. We ought always to remember that one of the most efficient modes of learning the healthful state of our body and the salutary operation of its various organs, is the study of their diseased states and abnormal conditions. The pathologic method is an indispensable one in all philosophy and in politics. The imperial time of Rome is as replete with pathetic lessons for the statesman as the republican epoch.

It would lead me far beyond the proper limits of this work, were I to select all the most noted periods of usurpation, or those times in which absolutism, whether monarchical or democratic, has assumed the sway over liberty, and thus to try the guage of our guarantees. It may be well, however, to select a few instances..

In doing so I shall restrict myself to instances taken from the transactions of modern nations of our own race; but the student will do well to compare the bulk of our liberty with the characteristics of ancient and modern despotism in Asia, and see how the absence of our safeguards has there always prevented the development of humanity which we prize so highly. He ought then to compare this our own modern liberty, with what is more

He

particularly called antiquity, and see in what we excel the ancients or fall behind them, and in what that which they revered as liberty differed from ours. He ought to keep in mind our guarantees in reading the history of former free states, and of the processes by which they lost their liberty, or of the means to which the enemies of liberty have resorted, from those so masterly delineated by Aristotle down to Dr. Francia, and those of our own times; and he ought again to compare our broadcast national liberty, to the liberties of the feudal age. ought lastly to present clearly to his mind the psychologic processes by which liberty has been lost-by gratitude, hero-worship, indolence, permitting great personal popularity to overshadow institutions and laws, hatred against opposite parties or classes, denial of proper power to government, the arrogation of more and more power, and the gradual transition into absolutism; by local jealousies, by love of glory and conquest, by passing unwise laws against a magnified and irritating evil, which afterwards serve to oppress all, by recoiling oppression of a part, by poverty and by worthless use of wealth, by sensuality and want of general virtue.

It may not be amiss to single out the following cases.

Liberty of communion is one of the first requisites of freedom. Wherever, therefore, a government struggles against liberty, this communion forms a subject of peculiar attention. Not only is liberty of the press abolished, but all communion is watched over by the power-holder, or suppressed as far as possible. The spy, the mouchard, the dilater, the informer, the sycophant, are sure accompaniments of absolutism.

The

1 Much that relates to the history of the spy and informer, in ancient and modern times, may be found in the second volume of Political Ethics, where the citizen's duty of informing is discussed.