Anglican tribe has spread and formed governments, or established distinct polities. Yet, as each of them may be carried out with peculiar consistency, or is subject to be developed under the influence of additional circumstances, or as a peculiar character may be given to the expansion of the one or the other, it is a natural consequence that the system of guarantees which we have called Anglican presents itself in various forms. All the broad Anglican principles, as they have been stated, are necessary to us, but there is, nevertheless, that which we can call American liberty-a development of Anglican liberty peculiar to ourselves. Those features which may, perhaps, be called the most characteristic, are given in the following chapter.

CHAPTER XXII.

AMERICAN LIBERTY.

AMERICAN liberty belongs to the great division of Anglican liberty. It is founded upon the checks, guarantees, and self-government of the Anglican tribe. The trial by jury, the representative government, the common law, self-taxation, the supremacy of the law, publicity, the submission of the army to the legislature, and whatever else has been enumerated, form part and parcel of our liberty. There are, however, features and guarantees which are peculiar to ourselves, and which, therefore, we may say, constitute American liberty. They may be summed up, perhaps, under these heads: republican federalism, strict separation of the State from the Church, greater equality and acknowledgment of abstract rights in the citizen, and a more popular or democratic cast of the whole polity.

The Americans do not say that there can be no liberty without republicanism, nor do they, indeed, believe that wherever a republican or kingless government exists, there is liberty. The founders of our own independence acknowledged that freedom can exist under a monarchical government, in the very act of their declaration of independence. Throughout that instrument the Americans are spoken of as freemen, whose rights and liberties England had unwarrantably invaded. It rests all its assertions and all the claimed rights on the liberty that had been enjoyed; and after a long recital of deeds

of misrule ascribed to the king, it says: "A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." It broadly admits, therefore, that a free people may have a monarch, and that the Americans were, and considered themselves, a free people, before they claimed to form a separate nation.

Nevertheless, it will be denied by no one that the Americans believe that to be the happiest political state of things in which a republican government is the fittest; nor that republicanism has thoroughly infused itself into all their institutions and views. This republicanism, though pronounced at the time of the revolution only, had been long and historically prepared, by nearly all the institutions, and the peculiarly fortunate situation, of the colonies; or it may be said that the republican elements of British self-government found a peculiarly favourable soil in America from the first settlements.

But it is not only republicanism that forms one of the prominent features of American liberty; it is representative republicanism, and the principle of confederation or federalism,' which must be added, in order to express this principle correctly. We do not only consider the representative principle necessary in all our States, in their unitary character, but the framers of our constitution boldly conceived a federal republic, or the application of the representative principle, with its two houses, to a confederacy. It was the first instance in history. The Netherlands, which served our forefathers as models. in many respects, even in the name bestowed on our confederacy, furnished them with no example for this great conception. It is the chief American contribution

'Federalism is taken here, of course, in its philosophical, and not in its party sense.

to the common treasures of political civilization.

It

is that by which America will chiefly influence other parts of the world. Already are voices heard in Australia for a representative federal republic like ours. Switzerland, so far as she has of late reformed her federal constitution, has done so in avowed imitation of the federal pact of our Union. I consider the mixture of wisdom and daring, shown in the framing of our constitution, as one of the most remarkable and one of the rarest in all history.

Of the strict separation of the Church from the State, in all the federated States, I have spoken already. The Americans consider it as a legitimate fruit of the liberty of conscience. They believe that the contrary would lead to disastrous consequences with reference to religion itself, and it is undeniable that another state of things could not by possibility have been established here. We believe, moreover, that the great mission which this country has to perform, with reference to Europe, requires this total divorce of State and Church (not religion).2 Doubtless this unstinted liberty leads to occasional inconvenience; even the multiplicity of sects itself is not free

2 I lately saw a pamphlet written by an American minister, in which the constitution of the United States was called atheistical-an expression I have seen before. I do not pretend exactly to understand its meaning. I suppose, however, that the word atheistical is taken in this case as purely negative, and as equivalent to non-mentioning God; not, of course, as equivalent to reviling the Deity. Even in this more moderate sense, however, the expression seems to me surprising. There was a time when every treaty, nay, every bill of lading began with the words, In the name of the Holy Trinity, and every physician put the alpha and omega at the top of his recipe. Whatever the sources may have been from which these usages sprang, I believe it will be admitted that the modern usage is preferable, and that it does not necessarily indicate a diminished zeal. The most religious among the framers may not have thought of placing the name of God at the head of our constitution, for the very reason that God was before their eyes, and that this occasion did not suggest to them the idea of specially expressing their belief. Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice

nodus.

from some evils; but how would it be if this divorce did not exist? The Americans cling with peculiar fervour to this very principle. We carry the principle of political equality much farther than any free nation. We had no colonial nobility, although some idea of establishing it was entertained in England when the revolution broke out, and the framers of the constitution took care to forbid every State, and the United States collectively, from establishing any nobility. Even the establishment of the innocent Cincinnati Society gave umbrage to many. We have no right of primogeniture.* This equality has more and more developed itself, and all States, I believe, have adopted the principle of universal suffrage. Property qualification for voting or for being elected does not exist any longer.

3

But here it must be observed that, however unqualifiedly the principle of political equality is adopted throughout the whole country with reference to the white population, it stops short with the race. Property is not allowed to establish any difference, but colour is. Socially the coloured man is denied equality in all states, and politically he is so in those states in which the free coloured man is denied the right of voting, and where slavery exists. I believe I may state as a fact that the stanchest abolitionist, who insists upon immediate manumission of all slaves, does not likewise insist upon an immediate admission of all the manumitted population

3 In Europe, where an accurate knowledge of the American state of things did not exist, it was, I believe, universally considered as the beginning of a new nobility, and pointed out as a glaring inconsistency.

* We can do entirely without it as to property in land. Our abundance of land does not require it; but there are countries in which the constant parcelling of land led to such a ruinous subdivision, that the governments were obliged to establish a minimum beyond which land shall not be allowed to be divided, and which, thus undivided, goes either to the oldest or the youngest of the sons.