POLITICO-ECONOMICAL.

POLITICAL GOVERNMENT.

MONARCHY, Aristocracy, Democracy, are the principal forms of political government.

In a Monarchy, government is exercised, laws are made and executed, by the authority and will of one individual. This form may be either elective or hereditary. Autocracy describes a monarchy in which the prince rules by himself without a ministry, council or advice. Originally, despot and tyrant meant only master and monarch; but the abuse of power, so held, brought the words to imply cruel and oppressive governors or rulers. King primitively signified wise man, and the title was bestowed to designate the eminently wise man of the community.

An Aristocracy is government by the nobles. It is also either hereditary or elective. The Feudal system had all the qualities of an Aristocracy.

Monarchy and Aristocracy, in their various forms, and in various mixtures of them, claim to be the best modes of securing ORDER in society; and they base this pretension upon their greater efficiency, and the higher wisdom of their functionaries.

Democracy is the special guardian of LIBERTY. A simple Democracy is a government of the people by the direct

est agencies. Representative Republicanism, while it respects the self-government of every individual as a leading principle, imposes more or less incapacity, and interposes, also, more embarrassments than the simplest and purest liberty would allow. The argument of inconvenience is alleged, and so, incompetency is managed without being offended, and the will of the people gets expression only in emergencies when, from some extraordinary cause, the community is aroused to assert it. Servants, to whom government is delegated, are under the same temptations to abuse the trust that masters are to whom it is surrendered; but, as they are responsible, and elective at short periods, they must rely upon fraud, instead of force, to accomplish their ends.

Democracy rests upon the innate right of all men to self-government. It is worthy of note that in New York, where suffrage is freest, only one-fifth of the population are qualified voters, and the Commonwealth is governed by a majority of these, or one-tenth of its people. In representative democracies of the freest form the incapacities of nonage, sex, alienage, and imprisonment for crime, disqualify four-fifths of the people for the exercise of citizenship.

All existing forms of government thus sacrifice or repress liberty to secure order. Absolutism, feudalism, republicanism, alike, have their arguments for government by the wisest and the best. The difference in practical results is immense -as great as the difference between the one and the hundred or the million mass; but still they agree in the principle, that some natural rights must be surrendered in order to secure the rest. They differ in the extent, but not in the principle of their respective demands.

Liberty and order have long been supposed incompatible; but they are not so; else, men must either be slaves or demons, There is something, an element in each of the

forms of government which we have enumerated, that is capable of agreement and harmony with something essential to each of the others. What each form affirms consistently with that which is affirmed by every other is true; what they contradict in each other is false. Monarchy is unity of purpose exerted through a single exponent of the public will. This is true; but, when monarchy denies individual liberty, it is false. So, popular freedom is true, but when it denies unity of purpose it is disorder. Hereditary Aristocracy is so far true as it affirms the physiological descent of high qualities from parent to child as a general law. It is false, when it claims government as an appanage of birth without respect to qualification.

A true order would provide the government of the wisest and best on earth as in heaven, and so as to secure individual liberty, and guarantee the supply of the natural wants, and the highest culture to each and to all.

GOVERNMENT-POLITICAL AND NATURAL.

DEMOCRACY affirms that "the world is governed too much," and that "that is the best government which governs least." If this principle is strong enough to carry all its consequences, it is then true that no government at all would be the perfection of political science. This doctrine, however, is checked up by that other general principle— government is necessary to the protection of the weak against the strong, and for the general good order and safety of society. To this end organic laws, called state constitutions, are formed, which protect the minority by tying up the

hands of the majority in the very teeth of the principle, that the right of government is in the greater number of voices.

Here we have a pretty parcel of apparent contradictions; to wit: The least governing is best, but the completed and consummated idea, no government at all, is absurd! The majority has the right to rule, and is the only legitimate method of settling the right and wrong of any question which concerns civil life and conduct, but-constitutions must be adopted to secure the weak, the rights of the weak, against that RIGHT! Can these things be reconciled?

We think that all these propositions are in their way true. Self-government is everywhere encroached upon by the political power; everything ordained or forbidden by the municipal law is so much taken away from the freedom of the subject. Consulting the individual's liberty only, the least governing is best, and none at all the best of all; but this must be understood only of government by the majority of voices, which rules in the sole right of numbers, and enforces its will with pains and penalties. When men are utterly rid of that sort of government they will be better and happier than they are; but they must be better and happier before they can be rid of it.

Government is indeed necessary to the protection of the weak, and constitutions are necessary in democracies to guard the rights of the minority; but it does not follow that government and constitutions must be political and separated, as they now are, into a distinct function. The general organic action of society might be made to answer all the ends of life, and the office and use of political government might be fulfilled perfectly, by the regular and integral activities of such natural organization. The family, as nature institutes it, has no distinctive apparatus of political system in its economy. The parents levy no taxes-they

take all the children's labor. They reserve to themselves no separate aims and interests-they give all they have in return. Parents and children have each their individuality and all its incidents, but they are in effect a unit, a family. Conflicting rights are not jumbled into a paradox to afford protection to the weak; the principles of the societary structure devote all the kinds of strength in the strongest to the service of the weak; the elder serve the younger. The father charges no salary for his services to the little community, and the mother runs up no milk bills against her babies.

Here is one good government without a supplementary political apparatus.

Cannot Democracy find some way of organizing the human family, which will really recognize the natural brotherhood? Can it not find some method of action which will really protect the weak and nurse them too, and that without contradicting one of its fundamental principles by another? Now, that it has fairly overthrown the one-man power, we next need to have the despotism of majorities dethroned; we need some better method of determining the right than by counting noses; and some mode of making every man competent to every act of government which he must exercise in the general economy.

Democracy will never be self-adjusted, nor self-justified, till it has organized institutions in which all its instincts are harmonized in a natural order.

The compromise of "the greatest good of the greatest number," is as meagre and mean as the policy of the old time feudalisms. Every system of slavery in the world rests upon this pretence. It is purposely false in some of them; it is in effect false in all systems which acknowledge it. It is the rights of all, the greatest good of all, which the