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in the consciousness of men. It has awakened the higher moral emotion, and its response has been from the higher moral spirit. It has called forth the willing sacrifice of those who were worthy. The life of the individual has been given for the life of the nation. The offering has been laid upon that, which in the holiest spirit has been held as an altar, and life has been given in that sacrifice in which life is found. If the nation had only a formal existence, this moral spirit could have no justification, and if its origin was in self-interest, to call for self-sacrifice would be the negation of it; and if its end was only in the protection of the life and property of the individual, this surrender of them would be the immediate defeat of its end.

The nation is a moral person, since it is the organized life of society, and society is formed in the spirit and in the power of a personal life. It is to be governed in the conscious determination of the will, and to act as one who looks before and after. The strength which is to be wrought in it, exists only in rectitude of thought and of will; wisdom and courage, steadfastness and reverence, faith and hope are attributes of it; the highest personal elements become its elements and are moulded in its spirit.

The relation of the individual to the nation presumes, as its necessary condition, the existence of the nation as a moral person. The individual becomes a person in the nation, and this involves the existence of the nation as also a person; for personality, as it is formed in relations, can subsist only in an organic and moral relationship — a life which has a universal end. The nation is thus the sphere of a realized freedom, in which alone the life of man fulfills itself, and it is to give expression to all that is compassed in life. It moves toward the development of a perfect humanity. Its symbol is the city of an hundred gates, through which there passes not only the course of industry and trade, but the forms of poets and prophets

and soldiers and sailors and scholars man and woman and child, in the unbroken procession of the people. Its warrior bears the shield of Achilles, on which there are not only the figures of the mart and sea and field, the loom and ship and plough, but the houses and the temples and the shrines and the altars of men, the types of the thought and endeavor and conflict and hope of humanity.

The condition of the being of the nation, as the power and the minister of God in history, is in its moral personality; in this it is constituted in history as the moral order of the world, and for the fulfillment of that order.

The assertion of the moral being of the nation has been the foundation of that which is enduring in politics, and has been embodied in the political thought and will which alone have been constructive in the state. Aristotle, who gave the furthest attainment of the ancient world, says, "The end of the state is not merely to live, but to live nobly." Hegel, who has given a yet wider expression to modern thought than did Aristotle to the ages before him,

and there is no other name with which the parallel may be drawn, represents the state as the realization of the moral, and in the moral alone it has its substance and being. He says, "The state is the realization of the moral idea," and "The state is the realization of freedom, and it is the absolute end of reason that freedom be real," " 3 and "The state is no mechanism, but the rational life of selfconscious freedom, the order of the moral world; "4 and again he says, "There is one conception in religion and the state, and that is the highest of man." 5

There is no other conception which has such power in the thoughts of men, and in this age it has the greater significance when it is drawn, not from a school of puritan

1 Aristotle's Politics, bk. i. ch. 2.

2 Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts, p. 312.

3 Ibid. p. 317.

4 lbid. p. 340.

5 Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, vol. i. p. 170.

politics, but from those most widely separated from historical puritanism, and finds its expression in the literature of a people which is rising to great political might.1 But those who have been the masters of political science, and it has perhaps fewer great names than any other science, all repeat this conception. Milton says, "A nation ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth or stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body, for look, what the ground and causes are of single happiness to one man, the same ye shall find them to a whole state." 2 Burke says, "The state ought not to be considered as a partnership agreement to be taken up for a little temporary interest and dissolved at the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection."3 Shakespeare says, —

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1 See Rothe's Theologische Ethik, vol. iii. sec. ii. p. 900. Stahl's Philosophie des Rechts, vol. ii. sec. 2, p. 181. Bluntschli's Allgem Stats Rechts, vol. i. p. 140. 2 Milton's Reformation in England, Preface to bk. ii,

8 Reflections on the French Revolution, p. 368.

4 Troilus and Cressida, act iii. sc. 3.

CHAPTER II.

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE NATION AS DEFINED IN THEORIES.

THE conduct of affairs in the nation is shaped after the conception which men may have of its origin and end, and yet it does not subsist in the individual and arbitrary conception, and cannot be made the exponent of that. It exists in its necessary conception, and every divergence from that is the building of some abstraction, or, as the French phrase is, " in the air," and through vagueness will result in feeble action, or, through defect, in negative action. The error in thought can involve only disaster in fact.

The representations of the nation, which most frequently recur in politics, and especially in its later phases, are mainly as follows:

The nation is represented as a necessary evil. It is a sequence of the evil which is in the world, and is incident to that. It is imposed on man to control the desires and lusts, and to curb the tendency with which it is said the inclination of his nature is toward evil. It is made necessary by the disorder and violence, the fraud and enmity of men, and the antagonism of self-interest, and is itself to be endured as only a less evil than these, and to lose its power as they abate, and to cease with their termination. It is simply repressive, and is the restraint which is necessary to check the evil drift of the world. This defines the state as the resultant of the existence of wrong, and necessitated by that; it is to be apprehended only as involved

in the sequence of evil, a manifestation of an estate of sin and misery.

This makes a destructive force the constructive cause of society. But evil in its necessary character is not formative. It creates nothing and produces nothing, it only consumes and destroys. It has in itself no elements of order, and can bring forth none. It holds no type after which things are to be fashioned, but only changes and disturbs them. Therefore the nation, its unity and order and progress, cannot be derivative from evil and an evil condition.

Government, which is the central organization of the nation, is not an evil. Its substance is in itself good, and is implicit in the conception of the good. Law, which is the ground and expression of its authority, is in its ultimate apprehension the manifestation of the divine will, as has been said of it in imperishable words, " Its home is the bosom of God, and its voice is the harmony of the world." 1 And freedom, which in the nation is constituted in law, is the sphere of the normal development of man. And the nation is not a mere negation, only a restriction of evil tendencies and an impediment to evil courses, as this theory assumes. It has a positive character and content. It is the manifestation of the life of the organic people, after a moral order, and in the institution of justice and of rights. It is a constructive power in history. It is not a local and temporary expedient, and its elements are not those which the scientific culture of another and a later age may set aside. It is not a fetter and a burden imposed upon the race, in an evil necessity, which it may gradually come in

1 Mr. Brownson says of government, "It would have been necessary, if man had not sinned, and for the good as well as for the bad. The law was promulged in the Garden, while man retained his innocence. It exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven in its perfectness." —The American Republic, p. 18.

"The nation is not only revealed as the power in conflict with evil, but even the beginning (Paradise) looked toward a development into a perfect kingdom." -Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, vol. ii. sec. ii. p. 81.

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