a constitutional monarchy, just as we have reason to believe that to the Czar of the Russias this greatest public good seems to be in an absolute monarchy, and to an American citizen it seems to be in a republican form of government. When Blackstone, comparing all forms of government with each other, became a panegyrist of the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain,' it could not be expected that he meant to comprehend in his definition that larger idea of political liberty "which cannot brook a king." And indeed to any citizen of a monarchy, who is content with his government, such larger idea of political liberty, instead of seeming to have any quality of liberty in it, must appear to be a species of treason.

William Penn's definition, which conspicuously adorns the walls of Independence Hall at Philadelphia, has been held up as a classical definition of a free government. He says: "Any government is free to the people under it (whatever its frame) where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy and confusion." This definition contains self-contradictions. Besides, when, in the text which prefaces it, the definer establishes to his own satisfaction the doctrine of the divine right of kings, he thereby entirely disqualifies himself for realizing the qualities of political liberty, and his definition

2

1 "Blackstone's Commentaries," Book I., p. 51.

2 Preface to "Frame of Government," Colonial Records, vol. I., p. 31.

cannot therefore be regarded as containing such a conception of political liberty as that of which I am now treating. Penn was a Royalist, and he could not entertain any idea of forming a government which involved absolute independence of the monarch from whom he received his charter of Pennsyl vania. His very acceptance of that charter implied a pledge of fealty to the hereditary monarch who claimed title to the vast domain of America by the accident of his birth. Penn received the province as a fief under the condition of feudal allegiance, the direct considerations of the grant being the military service of the father of the grantee, the rendering of tribute by the payment of two beaver skins yearly, the fifth part of all the gold and silver to be found in the domain, the continued faith and allegiance of the people of the province to the monarch, and the transmitting of all the laws enacted within the province to the privy council of Great Britain, for the rejection of all such as might be deemed inconsistent with the royal prerogative. Under such circumstances as these Penn could not have adequately conceived that idea of liberty whereby each one of the citizens of the commonwealth which he established was to be a freeman, a guardian of himself, of his rights, and of the associated rights of others—a sovereign in his own capacity, hostile to any notion of domination by birth.

Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois" held a high place among the framers of the Constitution. It

was a source of inspiration to them.

Washington

with his own hands copied an abstract of it made by Madison. Montesquieu was of the lawyer nobility, and held his judicial position as an hereditary possession. He was thoughtful and scholarly, and his work is characterized by a great love of system; but, measured by the standards of to-day, it must be admitted that parts of it are very defective. While he is broad, profound, and brilliant, he does not attempt to grapple with despotism in order to overthrow it. His chief service was that he set men thinking; he did not resolve their problems. As with the other writers whom I have named, his environments precluded the possibility of his forming a definition of political liberty which could stand the test of concrete illustration. In the multitude of the suggestions which he does give, taken one with another, there is great variety and contradiction. Many of them point in diametrically opposite directions. While some of these suggestions have been beneficially used in the construction of modern political liberty, others have been made the basis of the wildest political theories. Thus, for instance, Montesquieu is doubtless the originator of the idea by which we have made co-ordinate the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of our gov ernment. Yet his dictum, that in commercial countries it is the duty of the government to exercise a 1 Bancroft's "History of the Constitution,” vol. II., p. 9. New York, 1885. 2 "Spirit of the Laws," Book XI., ch. 6.

paternal care in furnishing work to every man, has become one of the fundamental claims of that branch of socialism which was lately led by Louis Blanc. 1

I

As Madison says of him: "He appears to have viewed the Constitution of England as the standard, or, to use his own expression, as the mirror of political liberty." 2

While Jeremy Bentham, in his "Constitutional Code," fixes the sovereignty in the whole people and says "it is best to give the sovereign power to the largest possible portion of those whose greatest happiness is the proper and chosen object," 3 he assumes for this sovereignty something more than human power. Government, according to him, fulfils its function "by creating rights which it confers upon individuals," instead of confining itself to declaring and enforcing rights which grow out of custom and usage, in accordance with natural law. Thus, while he seats the power in the majority, and so far indicates democracy, his assumption is, that the power so conferred, unlike a power derived from agree1 66 'Spirit of the Laws," Book XXIII., ch. 29.

Nothing could be more grotesque than some of the reasons set forth by Montesquieu in support of slavery: such, for instance, as that " sugar would be too dear if the plants which produced it were cultivated by any other than slaves"; that "these creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose that they can scarcely be pitied"; that "the negroes prefer a glass necklace to that gold which polite nations so highly value-can there be a greater proof of their wanting common-sense?"; and that “it is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black, ugly body."—" Spirit of the Laws," vol. XV., ch. 5.

2 Federalist, No. 47.

3 Bentham's Works, Bowering's edition, vol. IX., p. 97.

4 Id., vol. I., p. 301.

ment, unlike any human power, is possessed of a supernatural quality. As Herbert Spencer says, commenting upon this process of reasoning:

"The sovereign people jointly appoint representatives and so create a government; the government thus created creates rights; and then, having created rights, it confers them on the separate members of the sovereign people by which it was itself created. Here is a marvellous piece of political legerdermain! . . . Surely, among metaphysical phantoms the most shadowy is this, which supposes a thing to be obtained by creating an agent, which creates the thing, and then confers the thing upon its creator!"

1

Bentham, often, in treating of liberty, combines the polemical with the philosophical, the practical with the theoretical, and not unfrequently confounds them. His doctrines, in the translation of M. Dumont, were propagated through Europe, and became more popular abroad than at home. This was partly due to the circumstance that, in the process of translation, many of the vagaries of terminology were eliminated; but more to the fact that there was so much in Bentham's writings that afforded support to the wildest theories of the wildest theorists. It was for this that they received their greatest favor in France. 2

2

1 "The Man versus the State," New York, p. 38.

66

Jeremy Bentham doubtless did a large service to the world in challenging a great number of words that had been masquerading in the language under false meanings. He did this especially in his “Book on Fallacies," in which he has a chapter on Impostor Terms." Unfortunately, however, he sometimes fell under his own ban; and Herbert Spencer furnishes several trenchant illustrations of this in Bentham's efforts at the treatment of ultimate human rights.