finement which produced it. Yet it requires due cultivation to value it. This mistake is founded upon the still more general confusion of ideas by which rude and uncultivated minds are considered as being in a more natural state than cultivated ones. More of this in the next book.

It is very true that men fall in love with what has cost them much labor, and many abuses are perpetuated, simply because it has given those who ought to effect a reform much trouble and perseverance to bring their minds to submit to them. But this proves nothing against us. Many excellent law reforms have been started by non-professional men, because they saw more freely, judged more boldly, felt more deeply. In the second book I shall quote a remarkable passage of Lord Bacon's on this subject. Yet what they saw or felt or judged of they did not perceive intuitively. The nobler anything in creation, the more it requires cultivation, development; the lower the animal, the closer it is connected with the whole material world around it, the less it acts by volition. The noblest object in the scale of our terrestrial creation is the human mind, which, considering the degree of perfection which it may reach, starts less finished into existence than anything else. It may be compared to a few given points or positions in the highest analysis, from which a vast solution is to be derived. Again, the noblest, vastest, highest institution is the state, which for that very reason requires more cultivation and exertion of the highest and best powers than any other. History abundantly shows that it is the cultivated, not the pedantically learned, who are the leaders; the instinctive fear of ignorance makes it shun or yield obedience to cultivation. The belief that learning trammels the mind for practical purposes, and especially for politics, is very common; yet throw a glance at the list of the great counsellors of monarchs or nations, and select those who have served them best and most truly, they have been nearly all hard, honest students; look at such men as Michel l'Hospital, Sir Thomas More, or the friar Sarpi, whom Venice, the shrewdest of all republics, appointed adviser to the state. Nor shall you arrive at different

results if you view the nations of the earth. Greece, which stands at their head, did not arrive at that proud historical eminence by mere instinctive genius; see how her great men labored and toiled, though no nation probably was at the same time more happily gifted; how earnestly her statesmen as well as artists studied. Think and act, and you will influence.

XLVIII. If we are desirous of doing our duty, we must know it; and we cannot know it without an accurate appreciation of the relations which may call for its exercise. In political ethics, therefore, it will be necessary, before all, to have a distinct idea of what the state essentially is. I have given my views of this greatest institution in the next book. I shall be obliged to treat in it many problems properly belonging to natural law; but the reader will find that this apparent deviation from the subject strictly before us was necessary. We cannot thoroughly discuss and investigate the duties of the citizen, for instance, when in the opposition, his obligation as to unwise, unjust, or depraving laws, his rightful conduct as an executive officer, in a word, all his ethical relations growing out of the state, without first inquiring into the essence of this institution; and as I cannot, without many reservations, subscribe to any extant political theory, I shall be obliged to give my own views, before I proceed to treat of political ethics proper.

BOOK II.

THE STATE.

CHAPTER I.

The Law is everywhere.-What is Law?-Sociality.-Origin of the Family. -Of Society.-Everything conspires to lead Men to Society.-Strong and natural Ties in Family Affection, Language, Division and Union of Labor.

I. IF you leave your home to take an airing, you may walk in security on the side-walk of the street, because you know that no rider will disturb you. Who or what prevents the people on horseback from making use of that part of the public road? The law, or, if they were to disregard it, certain officers, that is, men invested with authority likewise by the law, who have been charged to enforce this among other laws. This law, then, protects you. You proceed farther, and find these words on the sign-board of a bridge," Keep to the right, as the law directs," addressed to those who guide a vehicle. It is a law which commands something. You may pass an orchard with inviting fruits; the fence surrounding it might be easily scaled, and you feel an urgent impulse to slake your thirst with the juicy apples before you; yet you must not do it. Were you to follow the dictates of your desires, though most natural and perfectly innocent, the law would punish you, because it protects the orchard as the property of some one else. The law is made already, and thus it warns you. A decrepit and poor man is prevented by certain officers from asking those persons, who show by their dress that they live in ease, to give him from their superfluity that which he is unable to obtain by his own exertions; he is taken to a house designated by the law as a home for those

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persons who cannot earn their living. You sail on the vast ocean, at a great distance from all society; a man-of-war, perhaps belonging to a different nation, thousands of miles from your own, bids you to lie to and show your colors. An officer comes on board your vessel, asking for your papers, and requesting you to go with him on board his own. If you refuse to comply with his request you expose yourself to vexations, perhaps to danger. It is the law of your land, and that observed among nations, which obliges you to provide yourself with those papers and to produce them under these circumstances. In a foreign port a consul of your own nation advises and, if need be, protects you. The law directs him to do so. You see an individual depriving another of his life, violently and considerately; yet nobody attacks the one who kills, or rescues the other, doomed to die, because the law has decided that he should die in this manner-it is an execution. The law establishes schools and obliges parents to send their children to them. The law assists a poor man to obtain his dues from a rich one, and again it protects the rich so that the poor shall have no more than their due. A single individual says the harshest things of those in power, yet no one molests him, because the law has said that he may do so; and again, there are laws which all or nearly all dislike, or declare unprofitable, nay, even cruel, and yet they are obeyed unaided by physical force. The law has built highways, united rivers, severed mountains; it takes away property for the public benefit, and protects it; sends expeditions into remote regions, founds libraries and collections of works of art, adorns and beautifies; takes care that the merchant measures with a true yard-stick, and tells him in what money he must pay his debts; it condemns unwholesome food, prohibits your having more than one wife, punishes public immorality, interferes if your occupation disturbs or annoys others, obliges you at times to take up arms, at others prevents you from using them to avenge the most signal injustice, and at others, again, it permits you to use them. What, then, is this law, invisible, yet seen in its effects everywhere? Whence

does its binding power flow, that we obey it, even though we disapprove of it, and though we are unactuated by fear; which interferes with my most natural appetites, may deprive me even of the simple right of locomotion and confine me in a lonely cell; gives, divides, and defends, or takes away, property; assures me that it will carry out my will and disposition, even after my death, and defeats my will though distinctly pronounced; protects my life, and yet may demand of me to expose it, or may take it under certain circumstances; prohibits me from avenging wrongs, interferes with my own disputes, tells me I must not do a thousand things, though I may have a strong desire to do them, or that I must do things to which I feel a decided aversion; in fine, which accompanies me wherever I may go, penetrates into all relations of men to men, to animals and things, and, what is most remarkable, is never intermitted or suspended, but continues to act and every day creates new rules and regulations for man's conduct and his various relations, and with unceasing and inexhaustible energy seizes upon every new condition of men or things that may spring up? What is this law, that is so closely connected with ourselves and everything relating to us that few things, indeed, are out of its reach, that it is carried along with every individual into all new relations, actions, and operations; which extends over men, animals, the fruits of the field, the game and trees of the forest, the rocks and minerals in the bowels of the earth; which is so inseparable from man that whatever he touches he brings under its domain, even the produce of the vast and distant sea, in fish, whale, seal, plants, shells, amber, and pearls, and appropriates what the fury of the winds had carried to the bottom of the ocean, ownerless as it may be, the moment it is brought to light, to human use again? What is this law?

Law is the direct or indirect, explicit or implied, real or supposed1 expression of the will of human society, repre

1 Direct or indirect, i.e. by laws which emanate directly from the highest authority of the state, or from societies founded or permitted to exist by the state.