brain becoming weaker, as the land becomes consolidated, and the people more enslaved. Examine that history where we may, we find a growing tendency towards the separation of the consumers and producers; towards augmentation of the proportion of the class of middlemen; towards diminution in the demand for any of the human faculties, except that one which man exerts in common with the beasts of the field-mere brute force. The result is seen in the fact, that, extended as was her empire, Rome contributes but little to the general fund of art or literature, while the little Attica constitutes the great treasury to which all resort who delight in either.

With the downfall of the empire, and the general ruin of towns and cities, the artisan and the mechanic almost entirely disappear -society becoming resolved into its original elements-insubordination becoming universal- and anarchy taking the place of the little order which had before existed. Later, we find

Charlemagne engaged in the effort at co-ordination, and seeking to command subordination-calling together assemblies composed of various portions of the people, and instituting laws which all, both great and small, were required to respect.-At his death, the power of combination suddenly disappears, and anarchy and insubordination take its place-the feudal system, as it existed in both France and Germany, recognizing fully the power of the master to command his slave, while practically denying the necessity of subordination on the part of the master himself. Here, again, we have a resolution of society into its elements, accompanied by a further and more complete disappearance of differences among its various portions-slaves and nobles abounding, and physical force furnishing the law, in obedience to which all are required to bend. *- Following French history downward, as the reader has already seen, we find a perpetual effort at the establishment of subordination, followed by repeated failures, consequent upon the omission of all effort at so diversifying the employments of the people, as to make demand for the qualities by the possession of which the real MAN is distinguished from the beast.†

* The insurrection of the Jacquerie, A. D. 1351, with its accompanying horrors, was a necessary consequence of the total disappearance of subordination from among the nobles of France, during the English war.-See SisMONDE: Histoire de France, vol. x., p. 530.

† See ante, vol. i., p. 252.

§ 3. Turning now to other portions of Europe, we meet with insubordination in the ratio of the absence of those differences, without which society cannot obtain its natural form, nor can men become free-striking evidence of this being presented by England in the days of the Plantagenets-Scotland, in those of the Stuarts -Denmark, in the period anterior to Frederic III.—and Poland, down to the day of its partition.

as the

Tracing history onward, any and every where, we obtain evidence that, in every case of advancing civilization, as the latent human faculties have become more and more developed power of association has grown in strength. as man has become more master of nature and of himself—as society has tended to take its natural formas competition for the purchase of labor has grown - subordination has become more complete, while all have risen in the scale of being, and the man who labors has become more free. Examining, next, the movement of declining countries, we find the reverse of this-uniformity taking the place of difference - anarchy and insubordination replacing order and the laborer becoming re-enslaved. Looking now around us, we find that men have become more free in all the countries that have followed in the lead of Colbert-land having become divided, and the laborer having become more master of nature and of himself, in France, and in all the countries of Northern and Central Europe, with constantly growing tendency towards the development of that respect for the rights of others, without which there can be no real freedom.

Turning next towards those which follow in the lead, or under the direction, of England, we find, in Ireland, an insubordination resulting in destruction of life, property, and happiness, to an extent that has been nowhere else exceeded; in Jamaica, an unceasing state of warfare between the slave and his master, resulting in the ruin of both; * in Turkey, an almost entire disappearance of the societary organization; in Mexico, a great community that is being rapidly resolved into its original elements; in Spanish America generally, a constant series of wars, having for their object the determination of the question as to who shall control the societary movement; in India, a rebellion, attended with de

* See DALLAS: History of the Maroons, London, 1805.

struction of life and property to an extent that cannot yet be estimated.*

Coming now to England herself, we find a constant war of classes the capitalist holding, with Mr. Huskisson, that "to enable his capital to obtain a fair remuneration, labor must be kept down," and the laborer protesting against that doctrine as leading to the enslavement of his children and himself. As a consequence of this, "strikes," attended with immense loss to the community, and ending always in the defeat of the laborer, are of constant occurrence the result being seen in the facts, that land becomes more and more consolidated that the little landowner and the little manufacturer gradually disappear from the

* "I see you every where on the surface of the globe," says M. Michelet, speaking of the English in India, "but firmly rooted nowhere. The reason is, that you have every where been gathering and sucking the substance of the earth, but implanting nothing-neither sympathy, nor thought. Having brought no moral idea with you, you have founded nowhere. Your India, for instance, one of the finest empires that the sun has seen-what have you done with it? It has withered in your hands. You remain exterior to it; you are a parasite body that will be cast off to-morrow. You found that marvellous country provided with commerce and agriculture. What, however, except opium, now remains to be exported? No Englishman goes to India to settle there, and there is no marriage with the natives. The English will one day depart, leaving behind them no vestige, except the annihilation of Indian trade and industry, and the ruin of its agriculture."

The accuracy of the view thus presented by a distinguished Frenchman, is fully confirmed by the following extract from a letter of "an Indian official," given in a recent London journal:

"For years and years, we have been acting as if we were under no moral responsibility whatsoever. —as if India were a thing made expressly for our mere worldly advantage, and for nothing else—the natives of the soil no better than the wild beasts of the jungles, or being more helpless, only fit to be made hewers of wood and drawers of water, the slaves of the white man-that any pretence on their part to a share of the inheritance God had assigned them, was rank treason - that opinions, customs, and usages, as old as these hills, and as fondly cherished as an Englishman's liberty, were to be given up, and cast aside, with as much ease as you would throw aside an old bonnet, if they did not square with John Bull's notions, or stood in the way of his selfishness and cupidity. This is exactly what we have been doing for the last twenty years -we have attempted many things which even the boldest and most daring of their own native princes would never have had the madness to venture on. That cursed itch to annex; the vile and abominable corruptions, bribery, and extortion, practiced in our civil courts, and by the police; the dislike of the natives to our system of land tenure, which, however fine and specious in theory, and to write on, or to make a speech on, in Parliament, was most distasteful to the native cultivators, and left them entirely at the mercy of merchants and money-lenders, and was simply ruin to the poor ryot. All alike ignored their cries, and treated them with contempt, till at last they had recourse to the only mode of redress left to them-mutiny, insurrection, and rebellion! And I do say, for all the horrors and sad calamities which followed, England is responsible."

stage of action-that the power of association declines-and that the direction of the societary machine becomes more difficult with each successive year.*

In the United States, we find both the conditions above described the desires of the Southern portion of the Union being in the direction of an exclusive agriculture, while those of the Northern one look towards a varied industry and an active commerce. In the former, the growing insubordination manifests itself in a necessity for the enactment of laws, in virtue of which rights heretofore conceded to the slave are gradually withdrawn. In the latter, compelled, as it is, to follow in the lead of Britain, insubordination grows daily, with steady decline of morals, and in the respect to the rights of person and of property. †

All the facts of history may now be cited in evidence of the proposition, that the societary organization becomes more complete subordination more perfect — and man more free-in the direct ratio of the approach of the consumer to the producer, the development of a scientific agriculture, and consequent approximation of the prices of the rude products of the earth, to those of the finished commodities into which they are converted.

4. The more thorough the development of differences among men, and the more perfect the power of self-direction, the more complete becomes their interdependence; the greater is the tendency towards harmony in the relations of society, and mutual respect on the part of both laborer and capitalist; the larger is the production; the more rapid is the circulation; the more equitable the distribution; the more absolute the subordination; and the greater the tendency towards freedom for all mankind. The less, however, is the tendency towards the production of those "positive checks" to population relied upon by Mr. Malthus, and known to the world as war, pestilence, and famine.

That this is so, must be obvious to all who see in the individual man the type of that grand man to which we apply the term society and who appreciate the fact, that this great law

"We level the poor to the dust by our general policy, and take infinite credit to ourselves for raising them up with the grace of charity."FONBLANQUE. See, also, ante, vol. i., p. 446.

governs matter in all its forms, whether in that of systems of mountains or communities of men.-Throughout our solar system, harmony of movement-interdependence-is a result of that local attraction which preserves a perfect independence. So, too, is it with nations, the tendency towards peace and harmony among them being in the ratio of their interdependence that, in its turn, being in the direct ratio of their independence. As among individuals, the power of association grows with the development of individuality, and as this latter grows with the growth of the habit of combination, so does the tendency towards peaceful action among communities, grow with the growth of local centres, and with that of self-dependence-subordination to the laws of right and justice, among nations, growing with the growth of the power of self-direction and protection. Here, as every where throughout nature, action and re-action are equal and contrary-Harmony being the result of the perfect balance of these opposing forces.

The reverse of this, however, is what we are told in English books. From them we learn that universal peace is to follow in the train of a system that seeks a centralization of the manufacturing power of the world-thereby depriving the various nations of all ability to develop the latent powers of either earth or man-limiting them to the work of scratching out the soil and selling it in distant markets, and thus preventing the growth of agriculture. Under that system, interdependence in the bosom of the society dies away, while dependence grows, with corresponding tendency to the development of insubordination, and towards the production of the "positive checks" of the modern school. The effort now being made towards the establishment of trading centralization-that system which is advocated by the present British school - tends to the general production of a state of things similar to that exhibited in France, in the days of the Jacquerie; in Germany, in those of John of Leyden and his Anabaptists; in England, in those of Henry VIII., when 72,000 criminals were hanged in a single reign; in Scotland, in the days of Fletcher; in Ireland, throughout the present century; and in India, at the present hour; that state of things in which insubordination comes as the companion of a division of society into two great forces the very rich and the very poor,