Moral government

“ I found, that this impunity had gradually encouraged men of licentious principles to become more bold, and to teach doctrines subversive of all our notions of morality—of all our confidence in the moral government of the universe—of all our hopes of improvement in a future state of existence—and of all satisfaction and contentment with our present life, so long as we live in a state of civil subordination. ”

“ Moral government consists, not in barely rewarding and punishing men for their actions, which the most tyrannical may do, but in rewarding the righteous, and punishing the wicked: in rendering to men according to their actions, considered as good or evil. And the perfection of moral government consists in doing this, with regard to all intelligent creatures, in an exact proportion to their personal merits or demerits. ”

“ In supposing moral events to be capable of regulation by causes which men can govern, such as knowledge, division of wealth and power, and responsibility; and in supposing the moral qualities of man to be good and evil, and that either one or the other may be excited; there is no deviation from the ostensible phenomena of human nature. And as government is exercised by man, all its virtues and vices must be human ”

“ A government, a section of it, or a measure, founded in an evil moral principle, such as fraud, ambition, avarice or superstition, must produce correspondent effects, and defeat the end of government ; but resting upon a good moral principle, such as honesty, self-government, justice and knowledge, its effects will also be good, and conformable to the duty and office of government. ”

“ The general acknowledgement of the capacity of good moral principles to correct a bad form of government, is a vast encouragement to expect from them a capacity to correct bad governours; and hence our policy has resorted to the good and virtuous moral principle of responsibility, or a strong code of political law, which can exist and operate upon governours, if the nation understands its interest, at whatever degree of virtue or corruption it may be stationed, in fact or in theory. ”

“ Having but little influence in political government, they are the more likely to appreciate the need of a moral government, the special object of which it will be to protect them against the oppressive action of the temporal power. ”

“ Adams, in the dissertation we have copied, by contrasting virtue and fear, as principles of the moral being called government, discloses a correspondence with the doctrine of this essay; which is, that a government and its laws, ought to be founded in good moral principles, to advance the interest of a vast majority of mankind, however vicious they may be. ”

“ But grave as they are, still, in our present situation, we must, as American citizens, recognize it as our pressing duty to reëstablish the moral character of our Government and to elevate the tone of our political life. Honest government is the first condition of enduring National prosperity, power and freedom. Without the elementary virtues of political as well as social life decay will outstrip our progress. ”

“ Popular forms of government are possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency. ”

“ Government is another potent agency in molding the moral type. Patriarchal monarchy and popular government tend each to nourish a distinct morality, so that we speak of the9 ethics of monarchy and the ethics of democracy. As time passes, governments, speaking broadly, become constantly more and more ethical in aim and purpose, and hence act more and more dynamically upon the moral evolution. ”

“ And now, before I close, allow me briefly to say, that, as a new Christian state, there is one moral good we can do the world: we can strive after a lofty style of government, and the lustration of law and order. ”

“ As we follow the upward trend of the lines of the moral evolution of the race we shall hear louder and louder protests against this notion of communal responsibility, especially when this form of human morality has been transferred to the heavens and made a fundamental principle of the divine government. ”

“ Successful government by that sublime ethical essence called “moral philosophy” has fallen away before a more practical régime. Liberty to think, to speak, to write, to trade, to travel, was only partially and reluctantly yielded under extraneous pressure. ”

“ By exploding this analysis, and substituting that of governments, bottomed upon good or evil moral principles, human happiness will less frequently fluctuate with the characters of individual The reader will be often reminded of these principles, which are now to be applied to the aristocracy of paper and patronage. ”

“ Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely, in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the general good ”

“ As an individual is endowed with intellectual, moral, and physical functions for the purpose of ennobling his own existence, benefiting his fellow-men, and reaching by these means a higher plane of moral and religious life, so government, {63} as we now understand it, is organised to place it within the power of men to enjoy to their fullest extent, religious, civil, and political liberty ”

“ The first duty of government is to see that the people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education. ”

“ The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. ”

“ on the practical demonstration it was about to exhibit, of the happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrants. ”

“ 11 Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. ”

“ But what is meant is something different, viz. that the claim or right of the individual to have certain powers secured to him by society, and the counter-claim of society to exercise certain powers over the individual, alike rest on the fact that these powers are necessary to the fulfilment of man's vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion to the work of developing the perfect character in himself and others. ”

“ From these distinctions, applied to each political society and its members, are derived the most certain and universal rules, by which we can judge whether a government is good or bad, and in general of the morality of all human actions. ”

“ Nor can any one, in the least acquainted with that constitution of our nature which makes governments necessary, give any other answer. The highest moral obligations — truth, justice, and plighted faith — much less, prudence and propriety — oppose, of themselves, but feeble resistance to the abuse of power. ”

“ And so the purely restraining influence of the State, even operating through force, may have a positive moral value, because it represents, and is the only way at present devised of representing, the judgment of Society, and to shrink from the judgment of Society is, so far as it goes, a really moral fear. ”

“ I propose therefore to begin our inquiry into the detail of goodness—into the particular kinds of conduct which the man wishing to do good for the sake of its goodness is entitled to count good—by considering what is of permanent moral value in the institutions of civil life, as established in Europe; in what way they have contributed and contribute to the possibility of morality in the higher sense of the term, and are justified, or have a moral claim upon our loyal conformity, in consequence. ”

“ We feel, sir, the force, and acknowledge the justness of the observation, that the foundation of our national policy should be laid in private morality. If individuals be not influenced by moral principles, it is in vain to look for public virtue; it is, therefore, the duty of legislators to enforce, both by precept and example, the utility, as well as the necessity, of a strict adherence to the rules of distributive justice. ”

“ And who can calculate the extent of the influence of such a character upon the hearts and minds of this people, and even upon the future destinies of this country, in regulating the dispositions of those who aspire and those who are called to the high places of the nation? Who can say that it will not pervade the moral atmosphere, so as to correct many of those evil tendencies which we now see constantly developing themselves. ”

“ By far the greater part of the morality of every age and country has reference to the welfare of society. Even in the most superstitious, sentimental, and capricious despotisms, a very large share of the enactments, political and moral, consist in protecting one man from another, and in securing justice between man and man. ”

“ Leaving out of sight the question of a society wider than the state, we must say that a man’s life with its moral duties is in the main filled up by his station in that system of wholes which the state is, and that this, partly by its laws and institutions, and still more by its spirit, gives him the life which he does live and ought to live. ”

“ But a theory that thus ignored individual conscience and essential right, reducing morality to civic obedience, with no other foundation than the positive enactment of a monarch, at once and strongly re-acted in strengthening the conviction of the necessity and152 truth of the intuitional view of the moral faculty, and of the importance of finding a better basis for the ethical principle, both in the constitution of mankind and in the author of nature. ”

“ Their discoveries may perhaps teach moralists the true motive-power that ought to influence the actions of man—legislators, the true motives that should actuate him, that should excite him to labour to the welfare of society—sovereigns, the means of rendering their subjects truly happy ”

“ Therefore, I first invite your attention to the decadent state of our public morality. Our efforts to achieve the goal of economic and social fulfillment will be more effective and the results we obtain more permanent only if we can suffuse them with a pervasive moral regeneration. ”

“ Yet the very inclusion of the category of morality among state concerns indicates that society is not limited in its objects only to the physical well-being of the community, but has traditionally concerned itself with the moral soundness of its people as well. ”

“ The growth of the institutions by which more complete equality of rights is gradually secured to a wider range of persons, and of those interests in various forms of social well-being by which the will is moralised, have been related to each other as the outer and inner side of the same spiritual development, though at a certain stage of reflection it comes to be discovered that the agency of force, by which the rights are maintained, is ineffectual for eliciting the moral interests. The result of the twofold process has been the creation of the actual content of morality ”

“ And it will be long before social discipline has so far modified human character that reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order of things, will serve in place of reverence for the power which enforces law. ”

“ The other aims decreed in the fundamental law like the development of personal and collective discipline, civic conscience, vocational skill and social efficiency, should be subordinated to the cultivation of moral character as the handmaiden of an intransigent nationalism. ”

“ Why have we a choice, and a will, and a notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if every thing were to end here? ”

“ The issue of this may either be an apparent suspension of the moral growth of the individual, or a clearer apprehension of the spirit underlying the letter of the obligations laid on him by society, which makes his rational recognition of duty, when arrived at, a much more valuable influence in promoting the moral growth of society. ”

“ The capacity to conceive a common good as one's own, and to regulate the exercise of one's powers by reference to a good which others recognise, carries with it the consciousness that powers should be so exercised; which means that there should be rights, that powers should be regulated by mutual recognition. There ought to be rights, because the moral personality,—the capacity on the part of an individual for making a common good his own,—ought to be developed ”

“ And so, it must be added, are the sanctions of ethics and moral law. It is when we turn to the state, to the moral personality of the nation, that we encounter other laws and living forces which restore what an empirical science or a transcendental humanitarianism has broken down. Here the supreme test is spiritual—the well-being of the nationality. The state must build upon the family as its corner-stone; it must enforce those moral laws which the history of nations, as well as human experience in its best estate, reveal to be the inmost expression of the normal life of man. ”

“ But as the years passed, this truth came to be a part of his consciousness—that in some measure the thing we call custom, or law, or civilization, or society, with all its faults, is the best that man, endowed as he is to-day, can establish, and that the highest service one can pay to man or to God is found in conforming to the social compact, at whatever cost of physical pain, or mental anguish, if the conformation does not require a moral breach. ”