Hegemony

“ In history, the hero and the politician dwindles into a vain and feeble tyrant,—the slave of priests and women,—little in war,—little in government,—little in every thing but the art of simulating greatness.
He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable people, a beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into deserts by misgovernment and persecution, factions dividing the court, a schism raging in the church, an immense debt, an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an innumerable household, inestimable jewels and furniture. ”

“ You see men marshalling armies, and making war with one another to destroy each other, and take possession of their territory and wealth. One man who is in possession of wealth, power, and authority, sees oppression exercised by kings; so he follows the example, as do rulers who exercise authority under their sovereign; then others in a still lower degree do the same; thus oppression treads upon the heels of oppression, and distress follows distress. ”

“ Shall the decay of a mighty Empire be marked by such a House of Lords as may facilitate the plans of the demagogue, sinking the Sovereign to a Doge, and the Church to a State hireling, and giving to the Commons the unrestrained privilege of revolution and anarchy? ”

“ When a nation has no recorded standard of guiding principles of government, it matters not by what name it may be called—Empire, Republic, Oligarchy, or Democracy—it may fall under the blighting influence of the tyranny of a single individual, or a wealthy clique, or a military despot. ”

“ And when the same men shall be displeased with those that have the administration of the democracy, or aristocracy, they are not to seek for disgraceful names to express their anger in; but call readily the one anarchy, and the other oligarchy, or the tyranny of a few. ”

“ Had our population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by law and the tussle of misrule by pronunciamiento? Could a war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of principle? ”

“ Under the severe pressure of despotism the people rise in their fury, and snap their chains asunder. A republic follows; degenerating first into a rude and wild democracy; and thence into a cruel and more turbulent anarchy. ”

“ At length, the great conquest over executive power, in the leading western states of Europe, has been accomplished. The feudal system, like other stupendous fabrics of past ages, is known only by the rubbish which it has left behind it. Crowned heads have been compelled to submit to the restraints of law, and the PEOPLE, with that intelligence and that spirit which make their voice resistless, have been able to say to prerogative, "Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther." ”

“ One scheme of government after another is lifted up to be cast down—tyranny, oligarchy, slavery, commercialism, communism, parliaments, theocracies. The great warriors and the great statesmen are alike entombed in the ruins of their empires. ”

“ Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power—the parents of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism. May you be led to an imitation of that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of your country, which will teach you to despise wealth, titles, pomp, and equipage, as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the internal excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity and virtue. ”

“ The procession of political, social, and religious systems, the royal, imperial, priestly, democratic epochs, and all other great phases of human affairs, had been as passing cloud shadows, mere fashions of a day, compared with the hoary antiquity of the rule of the rich. Consider how profound and how widely ramified a root in human prejudices such a system must have had, how overwhelming the presumption must have been with the mass of minds against the possibility of making an end of an order that had never been known to have a beginning! ”

“ The once great and free republic, whose internal history had been the vehement and protracted struggle of powerful classes, whose external history the record of valiantly won victories and extended territory, was now groaning under its own bulk, and had exchanged its ancient liberties for the despotism of the sword. Society was in a state so corrupt that barbarism, because purer, would have been preferable to it. ”

“ The respective demagogues contended for mastery; and the nation gazed on their contests as on so many prize-fighters, whose uninteresting warfare regarded only themselves. Weary of confusion and discord; aware that faction had broken every promise and frustrated every hope; that the visions of freedom had been the harbingers of despotism; and that pretensions to moderation, disinterestedness, and purity, were but the disguise of rapacity, pride, and selfishness, the nation longed for the restoration of a lineal Sovereign, a regular government, and determinate laws. ”

“ Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race—the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. ”

“ It resorts to every form of violence and force, and its efforts are supported by the “moral indignation” of the majority against the heretic, the social dissenter and the political rebel - the majority for centuries drilled in State worship, trained in discipline and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority in the home, the school, the church and the press.
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. ”

“ The sentiment which governs our republic to-day is Hamiltonian; and the war and discord that have afflicted us, as the result of the looseness of our confederation, must long since have wrecked the nation but for the balance wheel with which he supplied us. ”

“ Where could oppression hide itself? Where could the lusts of the flesh plot their treason against the sovereignty of the spirit, beyond the range of spirit vigilance—this new safeguard of human society, the eternal law of progress, which is now unfolding? ”

“ We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State,—the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals. We say, what is very true, that this notion is often made instrumental to tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made up of the individuals who compose it, and that every individual is the best judge of his own interests. ”

“ From war results that other great evil, seen in the administration of the internal concerns of each country; the government being of necessity entrusted, [Pg 85] for the defence of the people, with the power of the sword, the people are governed by the sword of power. Hostile prejudices, the strife of interests ill understood, false judgments, and the jargon of languages mutually unintelligible, fears, suspicions, and precautions perpetuate the evil of disunion when the work of havoc and desolation is suspended. ”

“ Gentlemen of the Right, gentlemen of the Left, the great mass of the people suffer! Whether a republic or a monarchy, the fact remains the same,—the people suffer! The people are famished, the people are frozen. ”

“ Hegel writes elsewhere: 'The finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being, and to turn suddenly into its opposite.... Dialectic is the universal and irresistible power before which nothing can stay.... Summum jus, summa injuria—to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one another. Pride comes before a fall. ”

“ May those who govern her wide extended empire, so study the records of our former woes, and shape their political course with such single-hearted observance of the unerring laws of God, as to become, under his Providence, our preservers from danger; and may the governed, remembering the tyranny which originated from insubordination; the daring ambition of popular demagogues ”

“ The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle. ”

“ But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators ”

“ If the power falls into the hands of the populace, the seigneurs, that is, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, are to be turned against the populace. If the power should fall into the hands of the bourgeoisie, then the populace and the nobility are to be turned against the bourgeoisie; finally, in case the power falls into the hands of the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the populace are to be turned against the nobility. ”

“ But half a century elapses and this free government is ruled by a despotic interest; the Republic sinks into the mire of slavery and corruption, sinks deeper and deeper, and the hope of humanity sinks with it. ”

“ The suppression, for instance, of anarchy and resistance to law—the complete establishment of the authority of the central government, in a state of society like that of Europe in the Middle Ages—is one of the strongest interests of the people, and also of the rulers simply because they are the rulers ”

“ In later times when democracy asserts itself the less-privileged orders, [62] championed sometimes by tribal or quasi-feudal kings, sometimes by usurping tyrants, equipped with mercenaries, compelled the ‘Elders’—that is, the old patriarchal sacerdotal nobility—to codify their laws and to admit to judicial power the ‘new nobility’ of wealth and the ignoble proletariat. ”

“ Is it not at least as true here, that the influence of exclusive privileges and extravagance in our governments, has increased, is increasing, and ought also to be diminished? Which is most oppressive, the influence of one man, or the influence of a combination between several thousand men, to rule and plunder a nation? ”

“ A populace enraged to mutiny, may claim the right of equality to which they are admitted in democratical states; or a nobility bent on dominion, may choose among themselves, or find already pointed out to them, a sovereign, who, by advantages of fortune, popularity, or abilities, is ready to seize for his own family, that envied power which has already carried his order beyond the limits of moderation, and infected particular men with a boundless ambition. ”

“ If the glittering exploits of ambition and the pernicious lust of power claim our admiration, how much more so should an event in which oppressed humanity struggled for its noblest rights, where with the good cause unwonted powers were united, and the resources of resolute despair triumphed in unequal contest over the terrible arts of tyranny. ”

“ Already we begin to hear, on the one hand, the sneering taunt at the fickleness, inefficiency, and illiberality of our proceedings, and the high encomium upon aristocracy and its concomitant advantages, and on the other, the expression of envy towards rising wealth and power, and utter contempt towards law and all wholesome restraint. ”

“ Every step in the extension of political rights has consisted in opening them to a class hitherto humbler. From kings to nobles, from nobles to burghers, from burghers to yeomen; in short, from strong to weak, from high to low, from rich to poor. ”

“ So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general anarchy. ”

“ Thank you, my Lord, for standing up for the plain Truth, so necessary at this time both to King and Country and that you have not suffered a faction whose personal objects are of a most base and selfish character, and whose political objects are the destruction of all popular influence and the establishment of an aristocratic tyranny. ”

“ And this spirit of egotism and usurpation produced two effects equally operative and fatal: the one a division and subdivision of societies into their smallest fractions, inducing a debility which facilitated their dissolution; the other, a preserving tendency to concentrate power in a single hand,* which, engulfing successively societies and states, was fatal to their peace and social existence. ”

“ And these ideas, welcomed by the unfortunate, will flower in acts of revolt as they have done in me, until the day when the disappearance of authority shall permit all men to organize freely according to their choice, when we shall each be able to enjoy the product of his labor, and when those moral maladies called prejudices shall vanish, permitting human beings to live in harmony, having no other desire than to study the sciences and love their fellows. ”

“ No matter whether they came in search of an asylum for their religious beliefs, or in quest of wealth or adventure—no matter whether kings still claimed this new world as theirs, and whether aristocrats or great proprietaries tried to preserve something like feudal authority—all pretensions adverse to political freedom speedily vanished in this atmosphere. ”