POLITICS: Gold and iron are good Aught above its rate. Fear, Craft, and Avarice Cannot rear a State. Out of dust to build What is more than dust, Walls Amphion piled When the Muses nine With the Virtues meet, An Atlantic seat, By green orchard boughs Fended from the heat, Where the statesman ploughs Furrow for the wheat; When the Church is social worth, When the state-house is the hearth, Then the perfect State is come, The republican at home. ESSAY VII. POLITICS. IN dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on sary foundations, and cannot be treated with Republics abound in young civilians, who b that the laws make the city, that grave mo tions of the policy and modes of living, an ployments of the population, that commerc cation, and religion, may be voted in or ou that any measure, though it were absurd, imposed on a people, if only you can get su voices to make it a law. But the wise kno foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which in the twisting; that the State must follo not lead the character and progress of the the strongest usurper is quickly got rid o they only who build on Ideas, build for et and that the form of government which p is the expression of what cultivation exists population which permits it. The law is memorandum. We are superstitious, and the statute somewhat: so much life as it ha character of living men, is its force. The stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so but how feel ye this article to-day? Our is a currency, which we stamp with our ov trait it soon becomes unrecognizable, and cess of time will return to the mint. Natur democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but d and will not be fooled or abated of any her authority, by the pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind. never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration. The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of men, and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest, of course, with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and |