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ment, which is the politico-economic puzzle of those who reflect on the social evolutions of western society. And this brings us to the chief defect of the framers of the ordinance, viz. : they were not definitely conscious of the great idea, that lay in their own provisions for schools and the means of instruction, and did not understand that providing constant opportunities for an equal start in life was the legitimate function of government, and its best work in counteracting the inequalities and oppressions which are ever generated by the individual pursuits of happiness in society.

If, however, it is assumed that positive legislation was necessary because nobody else could take the initiative, and that Congress was, as proprietor, the proper body for this purpose, then the public lands gave the basis for all such action; for Congress was by common consent the organ for their disposition and settlement; it could fix the price, the tenure, and the uses to which the money received should be applied. More than a mere "primary disposal of the soil" was therefore clearly implied, both in the pains taken to get these lands from the states and to transfer them to the Union, as well as the proprietary relation thereby created. It was well enough understood, that they might be and should be used as means for securing, to all, ever fresh opportunities for the acquisition and production of wealth. Was it not then a very narrow view to throw the lands rapidly on the market for purchasers that would hold them for profit? Should not a price have been asked fair to the actual settler and open only to him? And should not that price have covered provisions for schools, roads, canals, and public buildings? Why indite a government and regulate judicial proceedings, as well as prescribe rules on inheritances, dower, &c., but not provide things of primary necessity, such as those named? Was not the land necessarily the basis of the coming society? The ordinance policy meant to the new-comer and actual settlers the absorption of the money paid for the lands by the federal treasury, and irksome taxation as well as spoliation by the land speculators; while the right course would have been to have used the lands by asking a good price from the settler, payable in long yearly instalments, and use the proceeds for creating an ever-freshly-freed society. Why use doubtful powers and pursue shadowy ways, when unquestionable authority, for the realities of life, was ready to their hand?

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Franklin's land plan was meagre enough, but it had, at least, provision for military purposes, such as ammunition, &c., as protection against the Indians. And the "guineas" of the

land purchaser were to be used for that object, while the actual settler was the bodily basis of military operations. The ordinance spent its force in trivialities for such as that inevitable nonentity of American institutions, a governor, who is to be commander-in-chief (sic!) of the militia and to commission (sic! again) all officers, &c. In neither of the two programmes are roads mentioned, nor were there any provisions for any wellorganized public administration, or, as we call it, a "civil service." Both seemed to have an abiding confidence in the capacity of the settlers to help themselves to everything not inserted in the written plans; and this confidence would be charming, if it were not spoiled in the ordinance by the passages about the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, judgment by peers, the common law, the governational figure-head, and other things too numerous to mention, that showed that the better confidence was not there. No wonder that the settler, when he found himself supplied with these mere paraphernalia, got the notion that he might as well look to the central power for the substantial things also, such as United States troops against the Indians, appropriations of money for manifold purposes, and especially profitable public offices. And equally natural was it, that since the wealth produced inured chiefly to the landholders (for a rise), the state governments should fall as to public improvements, either to public borrowing or to corporations with doubtful virtue, and that it all ended in a general misdistribution of the new country's wealth. Millions thereof went to the creation of social inequality and oppression.

Ninety-three years have passed since the ordinance was written, and the phrase passes from lip to lip: What changes? Let us run some that are never mentioned over in our mind. The Articles of Confederation, under whose auspices the ordinance was born, and which were to be the eternal fundamental rule, are dead. The Constitution of 1787, not named in the ordinance, and yet its law, has its fifteen amendments. All the states of the north-west territory have their second state constitutions; Ohio came near having its third! Nearly every township is more emigrated from than they are immigrated into; over 4C0 out of 1280 townships in Ohio have actually receded in population between 1860 and 1870! The tillage of our farms is still soil-pillage. Our forests are being more and more denuded. We still kill private credit with amazing persistence, and are abusing public credit with audacious levity! Our elections are games of grab between demagogues; statesmen are either retired or discounted; our press is venal; our schools

academies and uniWe have plenty of Our pulpit orators

are full of scandal and intrigue, and our versities disjointed as to mental culture. pietistic formula, and but little religion. and public lecturers are only flatterers, because they know that that is the way to our pockets and votes. We have in Ohio 4500 pages of statutes; hundreds of courts to grind out law for us; and thousands of lawyers to defend and offend us therein. We ask: Is property or person secure with us? Have we any protection against the abuses of the taxing power? Have we a proper public economy? Who rules us? Are not bad men our governors? Does the inchoate or the matured public will reign in this land of ours? Who is freest in the country-the wicked or the good? We will not ask further; we have perhaps asked too much already; and we know of no better answer to our queries than the Roman adage, that expresses in four words the whole change that has been effected-"Pessimæ Republicæ plurimæ leges."

Do we recite all this to blame the ordinance for it? By no means. Our object was to tone down vaingloriousness and to teach a valuable political lesson. It is, that a society all eager to be rich, and not only in flow, but under blast of intersocial strife, cannot be incased in institutions prescribed by theory or political doctrine. The clothes of parent societies are either too large or too small for their offspring. Neither religious zeal for antiquated morals, nor political partisanism for obsolete rules, nor any new aspiration for reform in church and state, that rests for its facts on old society, can furnish the permanent institutions of new bodies politic. The ethics of a community, to be fit for it, must be the product of its own properly matured, collective public will. And it must embody the historic causes in the present wants as well as the future needs of a people, as far as they are ascertainable. In brief, the action, interaction, and reaction of every society upon itself, furnishes the factors of the life of a people. The ordinance was good in all that related to ascertained wrong, but the action of Congress, both in the confederation and in the new union, was extremely defective as to the biggest of all realities in the territories, the lands. Hence we have had the all-pervading discords and drawbacks of land speculations, where we should have had the harmonizations and incitements to good laws and wholesome institutions. The true perennially fresh liberty of the new society was, therefore, never secured.

CHAPTER VII.

THE INTERVAL-1783 TO 1789.

"A people become a nation only after they have a consciousness of being a totality."-Dr. C. G. Carus.

FRAMING Constitutions was the mania of the eighteenth century; it still exists, but is dying out. We know of no people that were free from it; but it was ever strongest in America, and there it had the greatest variety of phases. Some wanted constitutions for elevating the lower strata in society, that had hitherto been too much repressed; others wanted them for imprinting on the body politic new principles of political science and social order; others again, as Poland for instance, were for them as means for extricating themselves from the mischief of their old constitutions; with the fewest they were instrumentalities for attaining national political consciousness and consistency.

The ancients knew no such want, in our modern sense. Their highest laws were leges patria optime instituti. These, men of genius, such as Moses, Zoroaster, Kai-Muni, Confucius, Solon, Lycurg, Sysostris, Tertius Tullius, the Decemvirs, &c., either collated or originated. Nor had the Middle Ages such desires; they grew into their institutions through victorious lawlessness that, after victory, felt the necessity of political lawfulness for the social positions which they had conquered; and these feudal regulations are the notchings down of the sense of right that outlived their wild desires. Of them theology and jurisprudence kept separate tally-sheets; and as they neither agreed in nor corrected these, their reckonings, properly by scientific inquiries and rectifications, social and political science had to be called in and make something that should be above the laws of church and state, and the idea and the word for it we have in our modern "constitutions."

When we shall understand who was opposing and who was promoting the formation of the Constitution of 1787, we will comprehend fully the importance of this law of inter and

counter action in American politics. We had here all the motives for constitutions that disturbed Europe; and that of the desire to prevent the loss of liberty in the pursuit of new wealth besides. The new constitution was not alone a supplement and correction of the Articles of Confederation, but also of state sovereignty run mad in several state constitutions. The struggle for independence had been fought under adulations to the states, which were paid to them so as to coax them into their utmost exertions for success. And when it was attained, state self-flattery took all the merits to itself. Thus it became necessary to ask the states to surrender some abuses of their power, for instance, their wasteful land sales and their levying impost and transit duties. This was like the breaking of an old horse that had been badly broke as a colt. We will quote from some letters of the period to show the then prevailing conditions.

Washington wrote to Jay, August 1786: "Our affairs are hastening to a crisis; we have errors to correct, and have most likely had too high an opinion of human nature when we formed our union. Experience has taught us that measures calculated for the best happiness of men are not adopted nor carried out by them unless some enforcing power intervenes. I cannot see that we can long exist as a nation unless we establish an authority that can make itself energetically felt. The aversion to clothe Congress with adequate powers for national objects appears to me as the zenith of democratic folly and nonsense."

Jay then wrote to Madison: "It is time for our people to choose between freedom and anarchy; government without liberty, as well as liberty without government, is not a blessing, but a curse."

Jefferson wrote from Europe: "The reputation of America is, at this time, not flattering to its citizens. . . . We should ever bear in mind that loss of good name and war are the sequences of a want of attention to national character. As long as the states, each for itself, exercise the functions relating to foreign intercourse, there will be irregularities that will place us continually on a bad footing with foreign powers."

Henry Knox wrote to Washington: "The people here (Massachusetts) think that the property of the United States was, before England was ousted, and since, protected by the united exertions of all, and that it is therefore common property; whoever opposes this belief is declared an enemy of justice and fairness, and that he should be swept from the face of the earth. They are determined to wipe out all debts, public and private, and to procure for themselves agrarian laws; and they think

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