Page:The Democratic Heart.pdf/5

ing garment of the spirit which assumes them, and which has ever the same right to change or put them off" to alter or abolish them.' These two sides or parties must exist: the equator establishes itself in every world; and no man is charged save in his own conscience as being of one or the other.

The question of the right animus of adjudication between these parties comes to an issue when we ask, is there an absolute pre-established canon of right among men politically, a radical rule for all differences? or is something really due to chance, luck, sympathy, regardless of merit, law, or primogeniture, and left wholly to our personal good will-our position as neighbors, and what not, a duty of the hour?

Whoever admits there was any evil in the world before he came here must admit that some scoundrels have got into possession; men have peaceably transmitted and honestly inherited raptorial goods; and between the heirs of those who have been robbed and the heirs of those who robbed them questions must ever arise too late to be settled on any such basis as that on which they might have been, had a present charge of wrong been the first of its order, instead of being, as it is, the result of complications as old as the race. When radicalism says there is a relegated right side in every dispute it infers that at any cost this right should prevail and take possession, regardless of the custom of occupation and acclimation, and the intricacy of a thousand social ties. If your grandfather may have made a million as a pirate and freebooter, and died with his free boots on, leaving all to your father who died a peaceful citizen in his bed,- leaving you a peaceful and innocent (and perhaps wholly ignorant) inheritor-born and nurtured in the habit and expectation of luxury, and your children's habits and expectations prospectively wrought into the same social web, what can radicalism say of all this except that the whole existing social order should be broken up, to restore this wealth to the heirs of those whom the pirate robbed? ignoring after all a prior and ever foregoing question: whether those original owners came in with William the Conqueror, &c. Practically instead of this we uphold a justice which if not altogether blind is very near-sighted. We dare not look too far into the record. Wrong seems to outdate all history. The first man born of woman is said to have slain his brother; and no nation but is marked with blood on its title, and force or fraud on its boundaries.

It is apparent in the outset of any political inquiry that all questions of possession involve foregone conclusions, and can be settled only in a spirit of compromise and conciliation. No man owns anything regardless of the peace and safety of his neighbor. Every hungry belly, whether by bad luck or bad management, holds a natural declaration of war against the existing order. Neither your fortunate birth nor your strong arm nor your overreaching brain can entitle you beyond the needs of the outcast and the despairing. If a man is born to the possession of a whole county and can peaceably keep it and collect from it, well and good; if he has the wealth to buy all the wheat in the country, and make a corner in legitimate trade, well and good, if he can get away with it; but if we want some of it we will take it, Coriolanus to the contrary notwithstanding. Shall any magnate gather all the grain of the land into a heap, and then, alleging it to be his, make a bonfire of it to emblazon his memory, while our children are crying for bread? Certainly not. Nice customs courtesy to great occasions. Yet what follows? If a man may not do what he will with his own, all possession loses its tenure in a radical sense, communism is justified, and the existing order breaks up. But society is not founded on any such granite basis. There is no such divine and unquestionable possession of outer things. The world is simply awed and restricted into a laborious peace. Its policy is a loose network of interests protected by the present necessity of accommodation. In the turmoil which inheres with it radicalism must ever appeal to government as a divine appointment and fixture; democracy, assuming full responsibility therefor, holds all institutions as temporary, fluent, and versatile, and claims and seeks only to be guided by a spirit of charity and good will, and claims this no otherwise than as the necessity of the situation.

We are born into a set of insoluble problems, which admonish us to the Pyrrhonic suspense of judgment. We can but do, by the light of experience, the best we know- the conscientious duty of the hour. Our ears are open to the loudest cry-the cry of our neighbor-but we look to the latter