its progress to discard, and from which it may be ultimately wholly emancipated. It is itself the condition of progress, and in its course there is the striking off of fetters, and the deliverance from burdens, and a constantly increasing freedom.

The representation of the nation as a necessary evil, appears through many periods, and in many forms. It was the prevalent notion of the medieval age. It arises often from a want of satisfaction in the merely jural and economic representation of the state. The spirit of man demands something more and better than that, his hope and purpose look to something ampler and worthier, and that offers no sphere in which he can fulfill his vocation or unfold his energies, and when thus conceived it comes to be set aside as a necessary evil in the evil of this world, and also as transient in its nature.1

1 Mr. Calhoun makes this conception the base of his political structure. He defines the end of government, "to repress violence and preserve order." He says, "The powers must be administered by men in whom, like others, the individual are stronger than the social feelings," and therefore," since they may be used as instruments of oppression, that by which this is prevented is called constitution." While this is the postulate of the argument of Mr. Calhoun's essay, it is significant that he should write, in one of its first sentences, "To man the Creator has assigned the social and the political state as best adapted to develop the great capacities and faculties, intellectual and moral, with which he has endowed him," but the thought lies upon the page, and has no further consideration, nor does it enter into his construction of the state. Calhoun's Works, vol. i. pp. 7, 15, 52. Mr. Spencer is the most recent advocate of this theory, and presents it in its extremest shape. He says, "Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong, or, as we say, despotic where crime is great? Is there not more liberty, that is, less government, as crime diminishes? and must not government cease, when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its functions? Morality cannot recognize it."— Social Statics, p. 230. He says again, "Government is a necessary evil (Social Statics, p. 25), to terminate with the evil which is assumed as the ground of its existence; "it is a mistake to assume that government must last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization, is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct." Social Statics, p. 24. It would scarcely be necessary to notice these statements of this theory, but if they be received in the

The nation is represented as an historical accident. It is the outward circumstance of the life of man upon the earth; it is a phenomenal phase of society, the form which society in its manifold nature, in some places and some ages may assume.

But the nation has not been in history an indifferent phase of action in certain places, and a transient incident of certain ages, which this implies. As there is in the nature of man the evidence that he is constituted for the nation, so also his normal development has been in it, in the historical life of humanity.

It is not the characteristic of a single epoch, as would follow if it were only an incident in the life of the race, but it is a power in the continuous development of history. It is no ephemeral mode of existence, and instead of being the incident, it is the substance of history.

It is not the circumstance of the existence of man upon ⚫ the earth, but in it there is the determinate power in which man controls circumstance, and maintains through events the persistent expression of his aim. It is formed in the assertion of a dominion over the external world. Its progress is as it lifts man above the force of circumstance and the subjection to circumstance. Man is weak and dependent as he is isolated or withdrawn from it. It is not the occurrence of some fortuitous scene, to come and go, in the unlimited play of events, some single strand which is caught and woven in the loom of the years, with

thought of a people, they must work inevitable disaster, alike to the individual and the nation, and their repetition of the medieval conception of the state, which in that age was always given with a certain sadness and regretful sense of loss, involves in this age wider consequences. The characteristics of "the state among the Bushmen antecedent to government," are not further described, and there is no positive presentation of facts on which to rest these "other stages of civilization," which also were rid of government, whose existence the writer assumes, except as the "state among the Bushmen," may be also illustrative of them. When these assumptions are presented, with the pretension of a school that it always keeps a foothold of facts and is characterized by a scientific exactness, they may justify some surprise.

their ceaseless changes, and then not to appear again, but it is the fabric in which events are wrought.

This representation of the nation apprehends it as only an apparent order; not an end in itself, but incidental to the attainment of some other and separate ends; only a scaffolding for some interior structure, which it is to support, or an association for the advancement of the private ends of the individual. But in its vocation and the moral obligation which it cannot transfer nor evade, there is the condition of an immediate moral being. It has not the individual in himself and his advancement as its separate and special end, but in its aim as the universal, it constantly elevates the individual above a separate and special end. It has a life which may call for the sacrifice of the life of the individual in the higher, the universal aim. There is a false egoism, which has its root in selfishness, in this representation of the subordination of the state to private ends, whatever their disguise and whether they be of a so-called spiritual, or of a temporal character, and the necessary sequence of the principle it asserts is the dissolution of society.

In this representation it is common to regard the organization of government as identical with the nation, and to limit it to that conception. Thus the dynasty or the municipality, the tribal, or patrimonial, or imperial power, may be regarded as substantially the nation. But it is not comprehended in the simple fact of government. There is government in the family, and yet the family is not the state. There may be the recognition of and the subordination to authority, in an association which is organized for plunder, as in the brigand's band or on the pirate's ship. When the nation is apprehended as only an external order, the recognition of a certain authority, in a certain locality, and by a certain association of men,

1" Quæ est enim civitas? Omnisne etiam ferorum et immanium? Omnisne fugitivorum ac latronum congregata unum in locum multitudo? Certe negabis." Cicero, De Republica, bk. ii. ch. 2.

then it may indeed be assumed as the transient circumstance in a continually changing condition, but there can be for human society no real stability.

The nation is represented as a jural society. Its sole object is the maintenance of private interests and the protection of private rights. Its end is effected in the keeping of the peace among a certain number of men in a certain locality. Its process is a system of police. It is a vast constabulary force, which is to prevent disorder within certain limits of the earth. The nation is only a judge and warden, and that government is best which governs least. Thus one's country is a larger bailiwick, whose boundaries some convenience of administration has determined; the father-land is the circuit of the judge and the sheriff. The exponent of national power is the tipstave. To be a citizen, to be the member of a nation, has no other significance than a certain relation, in which each is held and bound over for the keeping of the peace. The only association recognized in the state is a jural relation, and the nation is only a jural society.

This conception is obviously imperfect, and while, as R. von Mohl says, it is so narrow as scarcely to need criticism, it is yet constantly recurrent. The state certainly has to secure the civil order of society, to repress violence and to punish crime; but this is not its sole nor its whole end. Every state, simply to maintain its existence, embraces a wider sphere and exercises larger powers. The aim of society, in its most meagre form, could not be accomplished in so contracted a principle.

This also regards the maintenance of the necessary relations of the individual, and private rights and interests, as the end of the state. Its law is in necessity, and in the relations which conform to this law, but it subsists no longer in a real freedom. It is no longer the growth of national character and spirit. There is no organic and

moral continuity, and its citizenship is no longer a living relation. There is no principle in which it can animate the spirit of man, and it can awaken no reverence for the past nor hope for the future. It cannot inspire the generous sacrifice of the present to the future, by which alone the life of nations is conserved. There is no place for the self-devotion which is the source of public spirit, and in its whole scope there is no ground for public rights and public duties.

This also confounds civil and political rights, or rather the whole province of political rights is denied, and the nation is limited to the definition of the civil organization. It is constituted only of persons in private relations, and only for their protection in these relations. But this is inconsistent with the essential constitution of the political people, and there is no principle in which it can apprehend the people as organic, and therefore as invested with political power, in the will of the political whole.

This conception is also destitute of an historical foun dation, and does not serve to describe any historical nation. It is a low and imperfect representation which fails to define the life of the people in its organic unity and organized relations, and makes no history possible in its own limitation. There is no ground for an historical unity and continuity. The historical course of every nation has elements which transcend it. It fails to represent, for instance, the life of Greece or Rome, of England or France, and eliminates from their history all their spirit and all that gives dignity and grandeur to their action.

This proposition has for its postulate necessarily a false conception, both of the origin of society as only an association of men, and of the nature of men as impelled only by selfish interests and toward selfish ends; and when it reaches its conclusion, as it merges the nation into the civil corporation, it indicates the beginning of a false civilization.

The highest organization of the civil corporation, and