Stable

“ The Criteria of Good Government.—Among the tests by which the goodness or badness of a government, or form of government, may be determined, are the following:
1. A good government is stable. Stability is the foundation of worthiness of character in governments as well as in persons. The basis of progress is permanence—one cannot grow wise, or rich, or strong, unless he can preserve at least a part of what he gains. "Conduciveness to progress includes the whole excellence of government." ”

“ Law is stable; the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed. ”

“ Then, in order to take horses as we find them, of all kinds, and to train them to our liking, we will always take with us, when we go into a stable to train a colt, a long switch whip (whalebone buggy-whips are the best) , with a good silk cracker, so as to cut keenly and make a sharp report, which, if handled with dexterity, and rightly applied, accompanied with a sharp fierce word, will be sufficient to enliven the spirits of any horse. ”

“ After you have saddled him in this way, take a switch in your right hand to tap him up with, and walk about in the stable a few times with your right arm over your saddle, taking hold of the reins on each side of his neck with your right and left hands, thus marching him about in the stable until you teach him the use of the bridle, and can turn him about in any direction, and stop him by a gentle pull of the rein. Always caress him, and loose the reins a little every time you stop him.
You should always be alone, and have your colt in some light stable or shed, the first time you ride him ”

“ Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household; ”

“ I had descended, then, not only into an inhabited world—not only into a world of men, who, however they might differ in outward form, must resemble in their wants, ideas, and habits, in short, in mind if not in body, the lords of my own planet—but into a civilised world and among a race living under a settled order, cultivating the soil, and taming the brutes to their service. ”

“ Out here with nature, stripped of all the gloss and glitter of civilization; alone, without that sense of security which comes to us when we are huddled with our fellows; a single atom upon the troubled sea of life—my own perplexities seemed to dwindle, and a feeling of peace swept over my care-worn spirit. ”

“ What is the use of your striving after power, which is more short-lived than a bubble? What is the use of your endeavour in the reformation of society, which does not endure any longer than the castle in the air? ”

“ At his elbow was the Duke of Athens, High Constable of France, and round him were the nobles of the court, fiery and furious, yelling their warcries as they waved their weapons over their heads. Six thousand gallant men of the bravest race in Europe, men whose very names are like blasts of a battle-trumpet—Beaujeus and Chatillons, Tancarvilles and Ventadours—pressed hard behind the silver lilies. ”

“ We have believed that stability depended upon rigid strength, not realizing that, in nature, the strong are the most fragile, while the weak are the most enduring.
The source of triumphant living is not the adamantine will that refuses to bend or budge, but is the will that yields itself to higher power. ”

“ To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction, let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis. Consider the multitude of human beings who inhabit it, and survey, in thought, the actions of the several classes into which they are divided. Their obvious actions are apparently uniform: the stability of human society seems to be maintained sufficiently by the uniformity of the conduct of its members, both with regard to themselves and with regard to others. The labourer arises at a certain hour, and applies himself to the task enjoined him. ”

“ The ideas and employments, which their seclusion from the world rendered habitual,—the familiar contemplation of the most sublime objects of nature,—the habit of concentrating their affections within the narrow precincts of their own glens, or the limited circle of their own kinsmen,—and the necessity of union and self-dependence in all difficulties and dangers, combined to form a peculiar and original character. ”

“ Why need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of action, and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. ”

“ These non-progressive purposes in which mental power is consumed may be classified as maintenance and conflict. By maintenance, I mean not only the support of existence, but the keeping up of the social condition and the holding of advances already gained. ”

“ Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. ”

“ Work, food, and sleep, all life reduced to its bare essentials, uncomplex, honest, healthy. They were strong, these men, with the strength of the soil they worked, in touch with the essential things, back again to the starting point of civilisation, coarse, vital, real, and sane. ”

“ And more and more each day Would men more strong in sense, more wise in heart, Teach them to change their earlier mode and life By fire and new devices. Kings began Cities to found and citadels to set, As strongholds and asylums for themselves, And flocks and fields to portion for each man After the beauty, strength, and sense of each— For beauty then imported much, and strength Had its own rights supreme. ”

“ Yet all this was scarcely seen—it was only felt—'a life, a presence like the air.' Most of us have known the same experience—how, when human beings come to the testing, the values of a house change, and how men and women, who have been in it as those who serve, become naturally and noiselessly its rulers, and those who once ruled, their dependents. ”

“ Let us divide this spacious earth into equal compartments, and see in which violence, and in which tranquillity prevails. Let us look through the various ranks and occupations of human society, and endeavour to arrive at a conclusion of a similar sort. ”

“ Kind persons among the rich, and wise among the poor, modify the connexion of the classes: the efforts made to raise and relieve on the one side, and the success and honest toil on the other, bind and blend the orders of society into the confused tissue of half-felt obligation, sullenly-rendered obedience, and variously-directed, or mis-directed, toil, which form the warp of daily life. ”

“ Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong,—that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns. ”

“ The stability of a government, for instance, is constantly set down to some ornamental part of it, when in fact the ornamental part has no more to do with stability than the incantations of the soothsayer. ”

“ The prudence of some and the follies of others would have already wrought changes ominous of a speedy return to the ordinary condition of society, with all its diversity of ranks and conditions. The bold would overawe, the cunning would outwit their neighbours, the sagacious and energetic would accumulate property, and with it power. ”

“ But I fear—In short, I have been told that political strife was a necessary result of human nature."
"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? ”

“ Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:—Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. ”

“ There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. ”

“ Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood. ”

“ But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to re-organize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher-endowed and happier-mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system. ”

“ I have often blushed within myself, and been greatly astonished, when I have compared the unerring path they all follow, all just, all proper, all wise, up to the necessary degree of perfection, with the coarse, the imperfect systems of men, not merely as governors and kings, but as masters, as husbands, as fathers, as citizens. ”

“ To be sure, there are many other ways of measuring our strength. This experience wouldn't help me the least in a discussion of principles, or in organizing any of the machinery of society. It is rather like going back to the first ages of mankind, and being tried in the struggle for existence. ”

“ Such perfect equilibrium belongs to a being favoured by nature, and is a pledge of happiness, no doubt; but the constitution of a character requires something other than this. We might say that the temperate come under our definition of character as complying with its two fundamental conditions, unity and stability, and that they have a 402system of action and reaction peculiar to them and consistent with itself, so that it can be foreseen. ”

“ It is wonderful how with this proper balance and use of the faculties they stimulate each other, and keep the mind alive;—“Peace is within these walls, prosperity within these palaces.” Such a one alone possesses his soul with the full use of its instruments of operation. ”

“ The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life. ”

“ We are, therefore, not to wonder that most fail, amidst tumult, and snares, and danger, in the observance of those precepts, which they lay down in solitude, safety, and tranquillity, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed. ”

“ Do you expect to have peace and plenty, to continue to thrive, and increase in property, in life, in herds, in flocks, and in the comforts of this life, while you are disobedient to those placed over you? You may for a season, but there is a rod preparing for the rebellious, and the righteous will have to suffer with the guilty. ”

“ The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. ”

“ Order, therefore, excludes all change which would make each world unintelligible through want of stability. But this stability, in the end, does not seem to require more than a limited amount of identity, existing from time to time in the sensations which happen. ”

“ Mental stability is their leading characteristic, they “know where they stand” as we say, they have a confidence in the reality of their aims and their position, an inaccessibility to new and strange phenomena, a belief in the established and customary, a capacity for ignoring what they regard as the unpleasant, the undesirable, and the improper, and a conviction that on the whole a sound moral order is perceptible in the universe and manifested in the progress of civilization. ”

“ Having once come to this resolution, we cheerfully shared together the labours of the field. One in heart and purpose, we dared remain true to ourselves, true to our high destiny as immortal creatures, in our conflict with temporal and physical wants. ”

“ And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint--a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel. ”

“ In reality, however, it appears to me that social equilibrium is no better established now than it was before. The weight which tipped one side of the scale is now on the other. The drawbacks of the lack of stability have not yet disappeared. ”

“ There had been spread before me the realization—on a small, sample scale of course—of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. ”

“ He looked to and labored for such a rearrangement of the social order, that all men who toiled, either with hand or brain, should share alike in the largess of the fruitful earth, and in the material bounty of God. ”

“ A higher civility will re-establish in our customs a certain reverence which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? ”