L THE EDITOR'S EVENING. DELUSIONS ABOUT LIBERTY. IBERTY has its delusions as well as its delights. Men coming into the enjoyment of liberty think themselves most happy. Nations and races about to become free imagine a return of the Golden Age. Peoples who manage by revolution and war to devise a system of civil government under which liberty flourishes, or is supposed to flourish, believe that thereby some kind of millennial state will be opened for the easy happiness of mankind. A great part of this vision is delusive and vain. It is a dream of the anxious soul hoping for much and realizing little. Men attaining to civil liberty get with their goddess a treasure of delusions as well as a treasure of realities. Liberty allures and then disappoints, not indeed because she has nothing to bestow, but because her lovers, dazzled by her charms, imagine that a free republic is only another name for heaven. Liberty is not heaven, and not a doorway into heaven. More frequently it is a doorway into a region of contention and blight and disappointment. While all nations have the instinct and hope of freedom, while they struggle hard to reach the condition of civil liberty, few or none have gained the prize, and none at all have enjoyed the high estate which they anticipated. Liberty has come to all such amid the radiance of high dreams, and has only too frequently receded amid the delusions of broken hope. What after all is liberty able to do for men and nations? In the first place liberty has no influence with nature. The natural world does not at all concern itself about human institutions or human conditions. To nature the government of Abdul the Damned and that of Switzerland are equally meritorious. Nature has never engaged in politics. She takes no notice of the puny methods of man in any of his theories and adventures. It is strange that the ancients should have committed the egregious mistake of supposing that the clouds and the seasons, the earth and the sky, the winds and the rivers, are interested in the affairs of men. A great part of civilization has been founded on the absurd belief that the world is greatly concerned about its principal inhabitant. The subjective superstitions of man have been spread out over the landscape of his environment, and against the most palpable evidence of the senses he has supposed this environment to be modified and affected by his desires and antics. meteor. Liberty is one of the antics-the sublimest antic, perhaps the best, of all which man has performed. But liberty does not make the sun shine. It does not make winter or summer. It does not make mountain or sea, valley, plain, or river. Liberty never produced a volcano or directed the course of a The tides of the sea and the phases of the moon are in nowise influenced by the fact of man's slavery or freedom. Eclipses and occultations have a total disregard of constitutions and election laws. Freedom and servitude are all one in this vast panorama of nature. The law of gravitation weighs a tiger and a man with utter impartially. To nature it makes no difference whether our products are consumed by natural decay, in the transforming fire, or in the stomachs of animals. If nature has any concern for any living creature, it does not appear on the face of the evidence. Certain it is that she has no partiality for any particular state or condition of She has one law for the despot and the democrat; one law for the slave and his driver; one law for the judge and the criminal; one law for the German philosopher lighting his lamp and the Bushman eating his worms. man. To suppose that liberty is any concern of the natural world is a delusion. To imagine that nature will be more or less beautiful because men are free or enslaved, is to commit the absurdity of the ancients. Liberty is no more precious to nature than is tyranny, or chains. To nature our Constitutional Convention was of precisely the same moment as an assemblage of Comanche braves. To nature the Declaration of Independence has just as much force as a negro song on the banks of the Suwanee or a Kamchatkan conjuration on the Yenisei. Neither does liberty or the absence of liberty affect the relations of man to his habitation. The political and civil condition of a human being cannot be made to reach into his environment. The moment that he attempts to extend the fictions of his intellectual life or social condition into the elements around him, that moment he is balked. Would he persuade nature to help him because he votes and makes speeches? Is there any sympathy in any part of the natural world for a man's political principles? Does nature care what kind of a man it is that builds a house or draws a furrow? Does she take care of one man because he has rights, and neglect another because he has none? Will a grain of corn sprout and grow the better because it is planted by a freeman? Do lilies and roses open their waxen cells and passionate hearts less gladly because they are planted and watered by a slave? Does it require less strength of muscle to row a boat or turn a capstan or wield a sledge because he who does it goes to the polls, signs petitions, and helps to save the country? The fact is that nature, in all these relations, is totally indifferent to the organic life of man. She uses her own resources for her own ends, and does not concern herself about human fictions and prejudices. Nature thinks more of a shovelful of guano than she does of the Constitution of the United States, and a great deal more of a barrel of rain water, with its millions of wiggletails, than she does of the whole moral law. What then? Is liberty nothing? Are the forms and conditions of the social life of man of no consideration among the eternal verities? Not at all. If freedom brings in a reign of delusions, she brings also a reign of realities. The condition of man under liberty is not the condition of man under despotism and servitude. Far from it; and blessed be the difference! If there be a glorious future for the human race, that future lies by way of liberty into light. But liberty is a manward and not a worldward thing; that is, liberty is a spiritual, not a material force. It has respect to man, but no respect to nature except by way of man. Human institutions are indeed a matter of indifference to the natural world; but they are in nowise a matter of indifference to the man-world; and the man-world rests on the natural world. The one is founded on the other. The feet of man are on the ground. His abode is in the air, and his forehead towards the sky. Standing in this relation, he may be a freeman or a slave. If there be one truth in this world, it is that it is not the same thing to be a freeman and to be a slave. Neither is the world the same under the dominion of liberty and under the dominion of servitude. Liberty is indeed able by the agency of freemen to touch the world, to deflect the forces of the environment, to change the face of all the earth. If nature be indifferent to man and his work, man is not indifferent to nature. This much may be said, that nature is not his enemy. If she does not sympathize with him in his work of civilization and progress, she does not at any rate resist him and defeat him in his purpose. Indeed she yields without a frown to his will and generous endeavor. By man's agency the world is much transformed. By man's agency the arcana of the natural sphere are penetrated, and the secret forces of the universe drawn from their invisible sheaths and made the instruments of his will in the accomplishment of the sublimest results. While the world is transformed by man, he in his turn is transformed by liberty. In this is the difference, that the slave transforms nothing, and the freeman transforms everything. The slave yields himself to the dominion of natural law, and for generations he and his descendants are by the laws of their being resolved into dust and inanity. But the freeman, the man of progress and of hope, is not so. Liberty has translated him into another mood. He himself becomes a force shall we not say a crushing force?-working among the eternal things. It is in this way that liberty as a fact and as a condition of man reacts upon him and works through him, not only touching the natural world, but transforming it, making a new landscape, in which immortal children play and eternal progress whirls her flaming car in the direction of the higher life. The conquest of the world and of nature is made by the freeman, not by the slave. Nature submits to be conquered, and does not resent invasion. She cheerfully gives up her forests and her prairies to the armies of the free, and supplies the roses and garlands for the triumph of her conquerer. If there is anything certain in human history, it is that liberty is the inspiration of progress. It is from this point of view that free institutions have their chief significance. The spirit of liberty is in the souls of men, and not in the natural world. The human race travels on across the domains of nature, invading, conquering, dominating the world, and creating a better and still better organic life, until the end come when the emancipation of man shall be absolute, the redemption of the earth from the dominion of blind force and the transfer of its sovereignty to the will of man shall be complete under the sceptre of reason and the inspiration of freedom. "PRISCILLA." Priscilla held New England in her breast Now, where old Leif strayed with his pirate kings They call "Priscilla" swims the ocean free! |