WHAT IS THE MORMON PROBLEM?
ÆSAR'S spirit still stalks the earth. It finds footing in the
American, as it did in the Roman republic. Time has but
shifted the scenes, not altered the plot, in the historic drama.
Having scaled Olympus and brought the gods into unity, its imperial
claims will not relax for man. Driven from the church, it sought
refuge in the State; the power ecclesiasticism lost, politics gained.
The danger to liberty to-day lies not in priestcraft, but in statecraft;
not in the enforced obedience of the people to revealed law, but in
the enforced obedience to assumed social requirements. Duties
are held as individual, rights social, and the individual has to bend
before the phantasmal abstraction "society." For centuries pro-
gress has been toward greater freedom; every extension of liberty
has widened the sphere of personal freedom In America, legisla-
tion is apparently tending toward greater restriction. Fifty years
ago many of our present legislative schemes would have been im-
possible. The American Idea" of that day was-" the best gov-
ernment is that which governs least;' hence men looked with jeal-
ousy on encroachments on individual rights. In fact, the essence
of government was supposed to be protection to individual rights,
that only in the extension of personal freedom could there be social
freedom. Or, as expressed by one of the revolutionary heroes,
Thomas Paine:
If we are asked what government is, we hold it to be nothing
more than a national association, and we hold that to be the best
which secures to every man his rights, and promotes the greatest
quantity of happiness with the least expense.
natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.
Why this eddy in the stream of progress; this apparent drift to
force and "strong government; " this rejuvenance of Cæsar's ghost,
urging centralization and reliance on might?
The answer is plainly to be seen. The spirit of Cæsar, rendered
powerless in religious systems, castrated of divine right in forms of
political government, is entrenching itself in the economic system
of the age.
British and German empires, Spanish and Italian king-
doms, French and American republics, are but dead forms, survivals