CHAPTER XXI.

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

43. THE last constituent of our liberty that I shall mention is local and institutional self-government.' Many

The history of this proud word is this: It was doubtless made in imitation of the Greek autonomy, and seems originally to have been used in a moral sense only. It is of frequent occurrence in the works of the divines who flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After that period it appears to have been dropped for a time. We find it in none of the English dictionaries, although a long list of words is given compounded with self, and among them many which are now wholly out of use; for instance, Shakspeare's Self-sovereignty. In Dr. Worcester's Universal and Crit. Dictionary the word is marked with a star, which denotes that he has added it to Dr. Johnson's, and the authority given is Paley, who, to my certain knowledge, does not use it in his Political Philosophy; nor have several of my friends succeeded in finding it in any other part of his works, although diligent search has been made.

Whether the term was first used for political self-government in England or America, I have not been able to ascertain. Richard Price, D.D., used it in a political sense in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, &c. 3d edition, London, 1776, although it does not clearly appear whether he means what we now designate by independence, or internal (domestic) selfgovernment. Jefferson said, in 1798, that "the residuary rights are reserved to their (the American States) own self-government." The term is now freely used both in England and America. In the former country we find a book on Local Self-government; in ours, Daniel Webster said, on May the 22d, 1852, in his Faneuil Hall speech: "But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration-the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all-that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be."

Earl Derby, when lately premier, said, in the House of Lords, that the officers sent from abroad to assist in the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, would "bear witness back to their own country, how safely, and to what extent, a people might be relied upon in whom the strongest hold of their government was their own reverence and respect for the free institu

of the guarantees of individual liberty which have been mentioned, receive their true import in a pervading system of self-government, and on the other hand are its refreshing springs. Individual liberty consists, in a great measure, in politically acknowledged self-reliance, and self-government is the sanction of self-reliance and self-determination in the various minor and larger circles in which government acts, and of which it consists. Without local self-government, in other words, selfgovernment consistently carried out and applied to the realities of life, and not remaining a mere general theory, there is no real self-government according to Anglican views and feelings. Self-government is founded on the willingness of the people to take care of their own affairs, and the absence of that disposition which looks to the general government for everything; as well as on the willingness in each to let others take care of their own affairs. It cannot exist where the general principle of interference prevails, that is, the general tions of their country, and the principles of popular self-government, controlled and modified by constitutional monarchy."

In one word, self-government is now largely used on both sides of the Atlantic, in a political sense.

This modern use of the word is no innovation, as it was no innovation when St. Paul used the old Greek word níoris in the vastly expanded sense of Christian faith. Ideas must be designated. The innovation was Christianity itself, not the use of the word to designate an idea greater than Pistis could have signified before.

That self-government in politics is always applied by the English speaking race for the self-government of the people or of an institution, in other words, that self has in this sense a reflective meaning, is as natural as the fact itself that the word has come, in course of time, to be applied to political government, simply because we must express the idea of a people, or a part of a people, who govern themselves, and are not governed by some one else. It is as natural as that in Russia the word self should be used in the term autocrat (self-ruler) not in its reflective, but in its exclusive sense, and should mean him that himself rules.

Self-government belongs to the Anglican race, and the English word is used even by foreigners. A German and a French statesman, both distinguished in literature and politics, used, not long ago, the English word in conversations in their own languages with me.

disposition in what is commonly called the government, to do all it possibly can do, and to substitute its action for individual or minor activity and for self-reliance. Self-government is the corollary of liberty. So far we have chiefly spoken of that part of liberty which consists in checks, except, indeed, when we treated of representative legislatures; self-government may be said to be liberty in action. It requires a pervading conviction throughout the whole community that government, and especially the executive and administrative branch, should do nothing but what it necessarily must do, and which cannot, or ought not, or will not be done by self-action; and that, moreover, it should allow matters to grow and develop themselves. Self-government implies self-institution, not only at the first setting out of government, but as a permanent principle of political life. In a pervading self-government, the formative action of the citizens is the rule; the general action of the government is the exception, and only an aid. The common action of government in this system is not originative, but regulative and moderative, or conciliative and adjusting. Self-government, therefore, transacts by far the greater bulk of all public business through citizens, who, even while clad with authority, remain essentially and strictly citizens, and parts of the people. It does not create nor tolerate a vast hierarchy of officers, forming a class of mandarins for themselves, and acting as though they formed and were the state, and the people only the substratum on which the state is founded, similar to the former view that the church consists of the hierarchy of priests, and that the laity are only the ground on which it stands.

A pervading self-government, in the Anglican sense, is organic. It does not consist in the mere negation of

power, which would be absurd, for all government implies power, authority on the one hand, and obedience on the other; nor does it consist in mere absence of action, as little as the mere absence of censorship in China is liberty of the press. It consists in organs of combined self-action, in institutions, and in a systematic connexion of these institutions. It is therefore the opposite at once of a disintegration of society into individual, dismembered, and sejunctive independencies, and of despotism, whether this consist in the satrapic despotism of the east (in which the pacha or satrap embodies indeed the general principle of unfreedom in relation to his superior, but is a miniature despot, or sultan, to all below him), or whether it consist in the centralized despotism resting on a compact and thoroughly systematized hierarchy of officials, as in China, or in the European despotic countries. Anglican self-government differs in principle from the sejunction into which ultimately the government of the Netherlands lapsed; and it is equally far from popular absolutism, in which the majority is the absolute despot. The majority may shift, indeed, in popular absolutism, but the principle does not, and the whole can only be called a mutual tyrannizing society, not a self-government. An American orator of note has lately called self-government a people sitting in committee of the whole. It is a happy expression of what he conceives self-government to be. We understand at once what he means; but what he means is the Athenian market democracy, in its worst time; or, as a French writer has expressed it, Le peupleempereur, the people-despot. It is, in fact, one of the opposites of self-government, as much so as Napoleon the First expressed another opposite in his favourite dictum: "Everything for the people, nothing by the

people." Self-government means-Everything for the people, and by the people, considered as the totality of organic institutions, constantly evolving in their character, as all organic life is, but not a dictatorial multitude. Dictating is the rule of the army, not of liberty; it is the destruction of individuality. But liberty, as we have seen, consists in a great measure in protection of individuality.

While Napoleon the First thus epigrammatically expressed the essence of French centralization,' his chief antagonist, William Pitt, even the Tory premier, could not help becoming the organ of Anglican self-government, as appears from the anecdote, which I relate in full, as it was lately given to the public, because the indorsement by the uncompromising soldier gives it additional meaning:

"A day or two before the death of the Duke of Wellington, referring to the subject of civic feasts, he told an incident in the life of Pitt which is worth recording. The last public dinner which Pitt attended was at the Mansion House; when his health

proposed as the saviour of his country. The duke expressed his admiration of Pitt's speech in reply; which was in substance, that the country had saved herself by her own exertions, and that every other country might do the same by following her example.'

"3

2 As to the first part of this imperial dictum-tout pour le peuple-we know very well how difficult it is to know what is for the people, without institutional indexes of public opinion, and how easy it is, even for the wisest and the best, to mistake and substitute individual, family, and class interests and passions for the wants of the people. This, indeed, constitutes one of the inherent and greatest difficulties of monarchical despotism. A benevolent eastern despot could not have said it, for there is no people, politically speaking, in Asia; and for a European ruler, it was either hypocritical, or showing that Napoleon was ignorant of the drift of modern civilization, of which political development forms so large a portion. London Spectator, of September 18, 1852.

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