CHAPTER XVII.

THE NATION THE ANTAGONIST OF THE CONFEDERACY.

THE nation and the confederacy represent the forces in conflict in human society.

The nation in its organic and moral being in history may recognize other nations, and may enter into certain relations and assume certain obligations with them; it may form an alliance or join in a league with them, for certain objects defined, for instance by a treaty between them; but each is subsistent in itself, and the convention which they form obtains its only force from the sovereignty of each persisting in it, and is conditioned upon their continuance, and expires with its own limitation or with their retirement. But this presumes the existence and affects only the powers and obligations of separate nations.1 It is apart from the principle of confederatism.

The confederacy is the construction of society in its own exclusive type. It defines the origin of society in the voluntary action of certain separate parties, and it is formed in their contract;. its powers proceed from the contract of those who are associated as private persons in it, and the authority of its government is derivative from the arrangement of the articles of this contract. The formation of society is artificial, and the government and order of the world are of human contrivance, certain expedients for the accomplishment of secular and separate ends. The

1 A principle of politics of increasing strength in this age is "freedom from alliances," and this is indicative not only of changes in the character and relation of nations, but of the stronger personal life of the nation. There was this consciousness of freedom in the advice of the fathers of the republic, as in the words of President Washington, "avoid all entangling alliances."

state is the exclusive possession of those who have constructed it; its government is their agent; its justice the scheme of their legislators; its freedom the resultant consequent from the exchange conducted on the entrance to it; and each is limited to the proprietors who are joint par- · ties in it. The end of society is the securance and furtherance of private interests; its order is the balance of these interests; its government is the representation of these interests; its primary and exclusive function is their protection.

The confederacy may be defined as the combination of separate individuals or societies who enter into a voluntary agreement, and in the arrangement which they have formed there is the source of government; the limitation of its action is with the several parties, and in the express terms of their arrangement, that is, it is the origin and institution of society in conformance to the civil contract. The highest principle in it is not the institution of justice which is in itself before all legislation, and is not created by it; nor the organization of rights which it may recognize but cannot bestow, nor the realization of freedom which although posited in an external order is of the spirit of man, and can no more be conferred by the lawyer than by the preacher or prelate or king, but it is the law of combination after which it is constructed. The confederacy has been called by its historian, "the most polished and the most artificial production of human ingenuity," and defined as a system in which each party," as an independent and sovereign power, and as in itself absolute, enters into a compact with others."1 Montesquieu, while regarding its primary object as security, which is assumed as belonging to it in a greater degree, describes it as "an assemblage of societies which is to arrive at such a degree of power as to provide for the security of the whole." 2

1 Freeman's History of Federal Government, vol. i. p. 6.

2 Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, bk. ix. ch. i.

The end is here only that of the commonwealth with which the state is identified. In the period in which Montesquieu wrote, it was presented as a formal system, -a precedent to oppose the formal system which identified the state with the prince, and in the conflict with the legal assumptions of feudalism, the social contract had a value while maintained as a legal fietion.

The formal constitution of a people in some period of transition as in an early stage of political development, or a later stage of political degeneracy, may take the shape of a summary of articles in conformance to a confederate system, but its characteristic is always the lack of permanence. If the people exist in the unity of a conscious and organic life, and in the continuity of an integral power in history, it is set aside as not representing the reality, and in the development of the people in its national being, with which it cannot consist, it is necessarily rejected; or if through the ascendency of a selfish power the unity of the nation is broken by it, there is in the lapse into the confederacy only the evidence in its external condition of that which has been wrought within in its moral dissolution.

The confederate is the immediate antithesis to the national principle, as the confederacy is the necessary antagonist to the nation in history. This antithesis becomes apparent in every aspect in which they may be regarded. The nation, as the organism of human society, presumes an organic unity; and its being, as organic, is that which no man can impart. The confederacy assumes the existence of society as artificial, as formed through an association of men in a certain copartnership of interests, and as only the aggregate of those who, before living separately, voluntarily entered it. The nation is formed in the development of the historical life of the people in its unity; the confederacy is a temporary arrangement which is formed in the pursuance of certain separate and secular

ends. The nation in its necessary being can have its origin only in the divine will, and its realization only in that. The confederacy assumes the origin of society in the voluntary act of those who separately or collectively enter it, and its institution has only this formal precedent. The nation is constituted in a vocation in history, and therefore has its own purpose and work; and of this it cannot divest itself, as if it was an external thing, nor alienate, nor transfer it to another. The confederacy is the device of a transient expediency, and in conformance to certain abstract or legal notions, or formulas, as the exposition of a scheme. The nation exists as a relationship, as it is in and through relations that personality is realized; and it can neither have its origin in, nor consist with, a mere individualism. The confederacy comports only with an extreme individualism, the association of private persons, the accumuiation of special interests, to be terminated when these may dictate or suggest. The nation exists in an organic and moral relation to its members, and between the nation and the individual no power of earth can intervene. The confederacy is only a formal bond, and the individual has no more, in the state, an end in correspondence to his moral being; and it is thus that the word confederate has become stamped with a certain moral reprobation. The nation exists in its unity in the divine guidance of the people. The confederacy allows only the formal unity which is created in the conjunction of certain men or associations of men.

Their antithesis appears the more obvious, the more intimately they are regarded. The confederacy assumes only the aggregation of separate parties, as individuals or societies, but allows no principle in which a real unity may consist, nor the continuity in history of the generations of men. It is a formal order whose condition is a temporary expediency, and its limitation is defined in that, and not in the conditions of an organic and moral being. It is not

the guidance of the people in its vocation, in the realization of its being in history, but its structure is framed after its own device, and out of the material which it has heaped together. It builds of its own brick and mortar which it has accumulated, what it alone can build, although its brick be as venerable as that upon which Mr. Carlyle has pronounced his political eulogium, building after its own schemes in the structure of society a Babel, and the result, which is not only a recurrent fact but a moral necessity, is that the work fails of all permanence in history, and the builders are driven away, or if it be preferred, they go away with confusion and division.

The antithesis which appears in the national and confederate principle has its manifestation in history. The confederate principle in its necessary sequence can bring only division, and unity and order are established only in the same measure in which it is overcome. The security, which it has made its single aim, it has failed to obtain; and in the furtherance of private and special interests it has been rent and broken by them. The pages of history contain everywhere the record of its disaster. The illustration of its course and its consequence appears as in these lands also it had its widest construction - in Greece and in Germany. The termination of the history of Greece is abrupt, as if the sudden and violent issue of crime. It. was as the confederate spirit came to prevail, in the division of her separate communities, and in the exclusive assumptions and supremacies of these communities, in the precedence of Athenian, and Spartan, and Theban, and Macedonian power, that the strength, which in its unity of spirit had triumphed over the multitudes of Asia, was lost; and in the dissension of these communities, which preferred alliance with a foreign power, so entirely was the national purpose effaced, and in the rivalries and jealousies of private ambition and devotion to private ends, the life of Greece was destroyed. The only union sought or allowed was in