The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 6

acknowledgment, are the real Laws of the Land. All that oppose these decisions, though passed by triumphant majorities, with loud jubilation, and fastened on the Nation as its sense of right, are mere rubbish, sure to be swept away as the waves of the National life roll on.
We, by no means, hold that even the best nation, in its most living laws, always declares perfect truth and perfect right. Human errors and weaknesses enter into all things with which men deal. And the Nation is ordered and guided by men. Nevertheless the Nation is an authorized teacher of morals, and these errors are the accidents of the institution. They are not of its essence. So far as they exist, they block its working, they stand in its way. Pure, clear Justice is the perfect ideal toward which a living, advancing Nation aims. That it daily come nearer this ideal is the basis of its permanence. And, meanwhile, though the result be far from attained, we none the less hold that the Law of the Nation is, to every man within it, the Law of God. His business, as a wise man, is to accept it, obey it, help it to amendment where he believes there is error, with all patience and loyalty.
For the first disorder in the makeup of man is wilfulness. The child kicks and scratches in his cradle. It wants to have its own small will. The first lesson it has to learn is the lesson of submission, that the untried world, into which it is thrust, is not a place of self-pleasing but of law. It takes parents and teachers years to get that fact through the stubborn youngster's head. It will burn its fingers, it will tumble down stairs, it will pitch head first over fences, because it will not learn to forego its own small, ignorant will, and submit to wiser and larger wills. In the good old days they used to think that matter ought to be learned in childhood once for all, and they labored faithfully to convince us urchins, by the unsparing logic of the rod, that the law of life is not self-will. Some of us, possibly, remember those emphatic lessons yet.
It is hard, however, to learn this thing perfectly. And so after the Mother, Father, and Teacher get through, the Nation takes up the lesson. A wise, wide, unselfish will takes command, and puts down the narrow, conceited, selfish will of the individual. The individual will may think itself very wise and very right. But the large will, the broad, strong, wise will of the Nation, comes and says: 'Here is the Law, the embodiment of the great, wide, wise will, to which the wisest and the strongest must submit and bow.'
That is the law of human position. Not self-will but obedience, not anarchy but order, not mad uncontrolledness, but calm submission, even to temporary error and wrong, is the road to ultimate perfection. Therefore, we can say nothing too reverential of Law. We cannot guard too jealously the clear trumpet-tongued preacher of everlasting right, sounding out a great Nation's convictions of obligation and duty. Hedge its sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land for right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling, therefore, with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred Majesty of the Nation's settled Order.
But the Written Law is only one way in which the Nation brings its teachings home to the individual. It is not the strongest way. The Nation's most powerful formative influence lies in its traditions, its unwritten law, its sense and feeling about the questions of human life and conduct, handed down from father to son in the continuity of the national life. And the power to hand these down depends on the fact that the Nation is a living organism.
For examine, and you will find every nation has a power to mould men after a certain model. We are Americans because we have been made so by the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a certain type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans. Greece took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England has the artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown up creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same power, and manufactures the Frenchman.
Now this moulding power, which every nation has, and the greatest nations the most markedly of all, comes mostly from what we call the National Tradition. Some people call it Public Opinion. They think they can even make it. They suppose it belongs to the present. In fact,