sure and a sense of entire security upon the on-coming of a revolution which to others is an object of terror and dismay. In our view, the ultra-political Democrat of our day has only half taken his lessons in the rightful expansion of human freedom. He, too, is, relatively to us, an "old fogy." Nor do we trust the safety of the final absence of legislation to any vague notions of the natural goodness of We are fully aware that no sum total of good intentions, allowing them to exist, amounts to a guarantee of right action. We trust only to the rigid principles of science, which analyzes the causes of crime and neutralizes the motives which now induce or provoke men to commit it.

man.

You speak in the most hopeless manner of the final removal of murder from the face of the earth. Do you reflect that already among us one-half the crimes of the Old World, or of other countries, are entirely unknown as crimes. Such are lèse majesté and heresy, the utterance of treason, etc. Thirty hours' ride south of us, the crime which actually shocks the public mind more than any other is negro-stealing. Throughout the Southern States it is pretty much the only crime that is rigorously punished. Here it is unknown, even by name, among the common people. What, now, is the cause of this wonderful phenomenon,—that one-half of the known crimes of the world are actually gone out and extinguished in this the freest spot (observe the fact) upon the face of the earth? It is simply this,—that the artificial institutions against which these crimes are but the natural protest of oppressed and rebellious humanity have themselves gone out-not, as is thoughtlessly supposed, to be replaced by better institutions, but by the absence of institutions-by the natural and untrammeled action of individuals in a state of freedom. There is no lèsé majesté, because there is no institution of majesty to be insulted or offended; there is no heresy, because there is no instituted or established church; there is no verbal treason, because there is so little of government that it seldom provokes resistance, and can afford to wait till the resistance becomes overt; there is no negrostealing, because there is no institution of slavery; there is no publication of incendiary documents as a crime, because there is no institution so conscious of its own insecurity as to construe freedom of the press into a crime; there will be no seduction, and no bigamy, and no adultery, when there is no legal or forceful institution of marriage to defend, when woman is recognized as belonging to herself and not to a husband, when she is expected simply to be true to herself and not to any man, except so far as such fidelity results from fidelity to herself as the prior condition, of which she alone of all human beings is a competent judge; and when, by the principle of "commercial equity," which, thanks to the same science of society, is now known in the world, woman shall be placed upon a footing of entire pecuniary independence of man and installed in the actual possession, as well as admitted to the right, of being an individual.

There is already far less murder among us than elsewhere in the world, because there are less institutions to be offended against. With still less institutions there

will be still less murder, and, with the addition of equitable relations between capital and labor, there will be none. Crime is just as much a matter of cultivation as potatoes. The way to produce it and the way to prevent it is a matter of science, just as much as any chemical process. Chemical processes go on and fail to go on in nature without our knowledge, but we can learn them and hasten or prevent them. Crime springs solely from two causes. 1. The existence of arbitrary institutions, and the ignorant and false ideas in men's minds growing out of our relation to those institutions, whereby acts are construed to be crimes, which, by the institutes of natural law, are no crimes; and, 2. The denial of equity, growing out of ignorance of the scientific principle of equity, and out of the want of sufficient intelligence and expansion of the intellect to enable men to see that their interests lie in adopting and acting upon that principle, when known. In other words, out of the denial of the sovereignty of the individual in all things, and out of a false or unscientific commercial system.

I see clearly, and even sympathize with, while I do not partake of, the fears of the conservative and half-way progressive, from the growth of the sovereignty of the individual. Still further, I recognize that evils and disorderly conduct grow out of its growth, when unattended, as it is hitherto, by "equity” in the distribution of the burdens and benefits of life. But I see just as clearly that the remedy for those evils does not lie in the direction of repression or forcible constraint, but in the acceptance and addition of an entirely new principle of order; not in going backward to a system which has been tried, and disastrously failed, for thousands of years, but in going forward to the discovery and application of a new and efficacious system.

You expressly acknowledge, you can not but acknowledge, that marriage does not work well for all the parties concerned, only for some of them; and the first must be content to sacrifice their life-long happiness and well-being for the good of the others. No such system will ever content the world, nor ever should. It does not meet the wants of man. Your line of reasoning is after the old sort,—that the State exists not for the good of this or that individual, but for the good of all, when you begin by admitting that the good of all is not secured. You are, of course, aware that this is the argument of every despot and despotism in the world, under which the liberties of mankind have always been stolen. The argument is the same, and just as good, in the mouth of Louis Napoleon as it is in yours. It is just as good as a reason for depriving me of the freedom of the press, as it is when urged as a reason for depriving me of freedom in the most sacred affections of the heart. The most stupendous mistake that this world of ours has ever made is that of erecting an abstraction, the State, the Church, Public Morality according to some accepted standard, or some other ideal thing, into a real personality, and making it paramount to the will and happiness of the individual.

So much for principles. Now, then, there is another thing in the world which

is called expediency, which is just as right and just as good a thing, in its place, as principle. Principle indicates the true and right toward which we are to aim, and which we are finally to attain; expediency, what we are to do provisionally, or as the next best thing, in the midst of the wrong by which we are surrounded, while working to vindicate principle, or to secure the final right. If your tariff doctrines, for example, and other repressive measures, were put fairly on the basis of expediency, or present exigency, and admitted to be wrong in principle, evils themselves, to be zealously overthrown as soon as practicable, I might go a great way along with you. Extremes meet. Ultra and intelligent radicalism has many points of relationship to rigid conservatism. Its surface action is often just the reverse of its deeper and more persistent movement. You certainly do not mean to assert that free trade is a wrong thing in itself; that it is a breach of one of nature's laws, a thing to be feared and defended against, if the whole world were dealing fairly and honestly in the reward of labor and in their interchanges with each other. You mean that, because the European capitalist deals with his laborer upon such terms as render him a pauper, American laborers are compelled, by their wrong, to resort to another wrong, and refuse to buy those starvation products, in order to protect their own labor from the same depression through the medium of competition. They are compelled by the wrong of others to deprive themselves of one right, as an expediency, to secure themselves in the possession of another right. Hence you are found defending a tariff on the ground that it is the most speedy avenue to free trade with safety,— free trade and safety being both goods to be sought after and attained.

So, again, you do not and can not mean that the time is never to come when woman shall possess the freedom to bestow herself according to the dictates of her own affections, wholly apart from the mercenary considerations of shelter, and food, and raiment, and to choose freely at all times the father of her own child. You do not, of course, mean that the free play and full development and varied experience of the affections is intrinsically a bad thing, any more than the development of the bodily strength or of the intellect; but only that it is bad relatively to the present depressed and dependent condition of the woman; just as intellectual development is a misfortune to the slave, only tending to render him unhappy until the final period approaches for his emancipation. You certainly do not believe that human society, in the highest state of well-being it is destined to attain, is ever to be attended by an army of martyrs, who must sacrifice their own highest happiness and "the highest happiness of all the parties immediately concerned" to the security and well-being of somebody else remotely interested.

Do you, or do you not, then, advocate restrictions upon the exercise of the affections as you do the tariff,-merely as a means of arriving the more speedily at complete "free trade"?

Dismiss, I entreat you, all your fears of the sovereignty of the individual. Cher

ish it rather as the glorious realization of the golden age of the future. Instead of whitewashing repression and reaction and martyrdom, and holding them up as things to admire and love and fight for, resort to them, if you must, as the unlovely expedients of the bad ages that are past or passing away. Fight for and defend, if you so judge right, as present necessities of the times, the censorship of the press, the police organization of domestic spies upon word and act, the passport system, tariffs, prohibition of divorce, laws regulating the affections of men and women, Maine liquor laws, and the whole system of arbitrary constraint upon individual freedom; but cherish in your heart, nay, proclaim openly, as the ideal, not of a remote, uncertain, and fanciful utopia, but of the imminent, of the actually dawning future, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of locomotion, free trade, freedom of intellectual inquiry, and freedom of the affections. Defend your restrictions upon the only ground upon which they are tolerable,—namely, that a temporary enforced order is only the more direct road to the more perfect order of complete freedom. Pursue that road, or any road which in your judgment will bring you fastest and farthest toward universal freedom, or the sovereignty of the individual, not rashly but surely, not inexpediently but expediently, not dangerously but safely and wisely and well. It is this freedom which the whole world aspires after. It is the dream of universal humanity, whether men or women. It is the goal of all reformation, and the most sublime and the most beautiful hope of the world.

You refer to my position on the marriage question as well understood. Unfortunately it is not so, and can not be so, if that question is considered by itself. I have no special doctrine on the subject of marriage. I regard marriage as being neither better nor worse than all other of the arbitrary and artificial institutions of society,―contrivances to regulate nature instead of studying her laws. I ask for the complete emancipation and self-ownership of woman, simply as I ask the same for man. The "woman's rights women" simply mean this, or do not yet know what they mean. So of Mr. James. So of all reformers. The "Observer” is logical, shrewd, and correct when it affirms that the whole body of reformers tend the same way and bring up sooner or later against the legal or prevalent theological idea of marriage. It is not, however, from any special hostility to that institution, but from a growing consciousness of an underlying principle, the inspiring soul of the activities of the present age,—the sovereignty of the individual. The lesson has to be learned that order, combining with freedom and ultimating in harmony, is to be the work of science, and not of arbitrary legislation and criminal codes. Let the day come!

STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS.

Mr. S. P. Andrews:

VIII.

MR. GREELEY'S REPLY TO THE FOREGOING.

Let me begin by setting you right respecting my position on a point where you expressly invite, if not challenge, correction. I never indicated "freedom from State systems of, religion” as one of the impulses of our time against which I take my stand. I think you never understood me to do so.. Nor do I regard the strong tendency of our time to wild, ultra individualism as an element of any progress but that made by Eve at the serpent's suggestion, Sodom just previous to Lot's escape from it, Rome just before its liberties were destroyed by Cæsar, and others in like circumstances. Admit the legitimacy of egotism, or the selfish pursuit of happiness by each individual, and a government of despotism seems to me a logical and practical necessity. Had the Pilgrim Fathers of American liberty cherished your ideas of the sovereignty of the individual, I have no shadow of doubt that their children would, long ere this, have passed under the yoke of a despotism as rigorous as that of Nicholas or Louis Napoleon. They founded liberty because they taught and practised self-denial, the subordination of the individual will and pleasure to the will of God (or, if you please, the common weal),—and thus only, in my judgment, can liberty ever be founded and perpetuated.

You totally mistake in attributing to me the assertion of the principle of nonintervention between nations as the principle of peace and harmony. On the contrary, I deplore the absence of competent tribunals to adjudicate questions of international difference, and believe all peaceful, just nations should promptly combine to establish such tribunals. Had such existed in 1846, we must have been spared the waste and the butchery, the guilt and the shame, of our bloody foray on Mexico. How readily all the intrigues and agitations of our day respecting Cuba would be settled by a just international supreme court! So far from rejoicing or acquiescing in its absence, I deplore that circumstance as the great scandal and calamity of Christendom.

The State is to me something other and more than a mob, because I believe that, since justice is all men's true and permanent interest, the heat of passion or the lust of gain, which too often blind men to the iniquity of their own personal acts, are far less potent in their influence on those same men's judgment of the acts of