Page:The Democratic Heart.pdf/6
end as well. We know no claim higher than humanity. We acknowledge no authority other than what we now consent to. National rights, state rights, all external bonds are accommodations subservient to our rights as born men. This is the only doctrine that leaves divine blood in our veins. We appeal not to numbers but to conscience. The state is not other than the citizens. Even now the court interpretation of law makes every man an officer, with the right of arrest; every man and woman may marry of themselves; yet in spite of repeated decisions of the courts the popular prints will discuss the question what officers have a right to perform the marriage ceremony. In philosophy it is the same: law is continually spoken of as agonistically prior, instead of historically sequent to fact. So does the majesty of the environment overawe the integrity of the unbalanced mind.
All truly democratic platforms are statements of general principles-never of special doctrines. As to what we will do in any contingency it is ever too soon to determine. We trust our leaders and representatives to their own lights. We believe more in ourselves than in our doctrines. And here especially we differ from the opposition; for we hold ourselves above the government, and walk upon platforms of liberal construction; they adhere to the letter that kills them, and set a government over themselves. Like the monstrous Frankenstein, their government overawes the intelligence that produced it.
Sometimes, in a congenial spirit, we call ourselves the Jeffersonian democracy. It is perhaps too great a compliment to any man thus to adopt his name, but it is not so far amiss if between the lines we read the inner meaning and private motive of that document as the voice of a citizen to whom all things were a religious as well as a political problem-an assertion of the individual disguised as an assertion of the state-When in the course of human events (that is, at any time) it becomes necessary (in our judgment) for one people (regardless of the number of people) to dissolve the political bonds that have connected them with another (with any other) why then it is simply courteous and wise to give notice and warning of our purpose. We hold it self-evident that all mankind (each and every man) is free (divine) and equal (his own judge) endowed by his creator (or in the fact of being) with the right to live freely and seek happiness after hi own theory; that to protect these right governments are established among men (that is, the mass combines to protect the weak from the native inequalities of individual power) deriving their just power from the consent of the governed; and whenever constituted government, taking advantage of its temporary gift, in fringes on these rights, it is the right and duty of every man to alter or abolish it a The force and credit of the declaration lie in its being the divine voice of individual man. An appeal to numbers is ever a confession of weakness.
Our radical friends would have made their declaration a Declaration of Dependence-to be intoned humbly through the nose: We are born poor creatures of total depravity into a government of alien and superior powers, where the chief seats were taken before we arrived. May we be meek and submissive in the condition we were born to; may we be saved from our selves; may we be thankful for what little we have; and may we at last be delivered to a better world!
It should not be wonderful that democrats, holding these views of right-finding all authority in themselves, and possibly disposed to have their own way, and especially while observing how all evils react against themselves in the world, are slow to follow every radical cry of somewhat that should and must be done at once, in defiance of our experience of the laws of human nature, nor that they are often accused of coldness and laxity, indifference to right, instead of being credited with faith that the world is managed through and over us to inscrutable ends, and that, go as they please, all men are about if not exactly equally happy. Neither must we wonder when a spirit of resistance straightens a man back of his own perpendicular, creating a contempt for what, unobtruded, might easily have been an amiable failing of his own.
The positions of the two parties as to the temperance question show fairly their relative spirit and style. That the democracy are slow to advocate sumptuary laws is certain; that they condone vice does not follow. We have all about the same opinion of intemperance: it is a personal vice and weakness. But the enforcement of the virtue opposite involves many ques-