Status quo

“ In the older countries of which I speak, political power and social recognition are supposed to emanate from some autocratic source, and the effort and ambition of all naturally look toward that source, and, knowing none other, feel a personal interest in maintaining its ascendency, the statu quo. In our own broad land, power and light have no such inevitable abiding-place, but may emanate from an endless variety of points and personalities. ”

“ WHAT, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society? ”

“ Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Everyone of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly anyone of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. ”

“ These differences are of several kinds; but riches, nobility or rank, power and personal merit being the principal distinctions by which men form an estimate of each other in society, I could prove that the harmony or conflict of these different forces is the surest indication of the good or bad constitution of a State. ”

“ The great and paramount purpose was to unite this mass of wealth and power, for the protection of the humblest individual; his rights, civil and political, his interests and prosperity, are the sole end ”

“ The true structure and government of human society will be clearly hinted by the structure and laws of the universe, and especially by that microcosm, [105] or little universe, the human organization. All the great stirring questions of the day, including the questions of suffrage, woman’s rights, the relations between labor and capital, and the questions of general political reform, will be put into the way of an easy and speedy solution; and mankind will be ushered into the light of a brighter day, socially, politically, and religiously, than has ever yet dawned upon the world. ”

“ But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.
For the fulfillment of those duties governments are invested with power, and to the attainment of the end--the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed--the exercise of delegated powers is a duty as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted is criminal and odious. ”

“ Be narrowed down to a given circle of ideas, which we shall not transgress! Do we not owe our growth and prosperity and power, to that freedom of inquiry which is the source of all progress and improvement? ”

“ What assurance can you give the people, sir, that under your rule they will have more freedom for self-government, more opportunities for self-advancement and prosperity and happiness than they have at present? ”

“ If the balance incline towards a more liberal form of government, towards democratic institutions, and therefore towards self-government, and the participation of the many rather than of the few in the affairs of the State, I am not to blame, nor is it my ordinance, but that of History and of Providence. ”

“ Democracy likewise appeals to authority, appeals to the people, to humanity, to the masses, to civilisation, progress, historical development, and so on. But these objective authorities must themselves be furnished with foundations. ”

“ They are the expressions in which it becomes real. As conflicting with the momentary inclinations of the individual, these institutions are a power which he obeys unwillingly; which he has to, or is made to, obey. ”

“ Let the weak and defenseless talk their fill of right, of justice, of equity; let these invoke reason, logic, common sense and fair play; but the world's rulers, the dominant class, know only one law, recognize but one rule—might. ”

“ These last-mentioned institutions have seldom been radically altered in any country by any process short of revolution, however persuasive the voice of right, of reason, and of utility, in favor of change. ”

“ The old Philosophy begins not only to preach but to pray: the new strives to catch the revealed voice of God in the oracles of less unfaithful days. ... In the teeth of an organised and concentrated despotism a new society had grown up, self-supporting, self-regulated, a State within the State. ”

“ We hear, indeed, some wild talk about the establishment of a social order, or disorder, without government and without laws and courts of justice, in which everybody can do what he or she pleases, and that when everybody can do what he or she pleases, everybody will do right, and have enough of the good things of the world, and be happy. ”

“ We are ready to acknowledge that extraordinary virtue, talents and wealth united, will govern, and ought to govern, and yet it is denied that this confession is reconcileable with the system of king, lords and commons. If a body of men, which possesses the virtue, talents and wealth of a nation, ought to govern; it follows, that a body of men, which does not possess these attributes, ought not to govern. ”

“ I have now only to add the hope that your deliberations may be characterized by that wisdom and harmony so essential to the attainment of those great ends for which you are here assembled; with my fervent desire that all your labors may, under the guidance of Heaven, give additional force and energy to all those principles of private and public virtue so indispensable to the stability, prosperity, and success of the Government and people of the Republic. ”

“ The power of working such a revolution is reserved for opinion and fashion. But there are men in society who ought to be independent of these two wavering powers: these are those that govern the people, and whom religion and the state have entrusted with their interests and powers. ”

“ Whatever may be the great and beneficent principles and arrangements which are to appear in the organic state of society which is to succeed the present critical one, the best scheme, up to this date, is unquestionably that which renders us now the tranquil, progressive, and hopeful nation that we are, at a time when despotisms and democracies are tottering or falling, in preparation for the next great new period. We have no desire to be alone in our privileges. ”

“ All alike, by a dogged persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also, and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and literature. ”

“ All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated [72] into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. ”

“ Such a task, sometimes small in its details, but difficult and grand in its comprehensiveness, required that creative, organizing, building kind of statesmanship, which to large and enlightened views of the aims and ends of political organization and of the wants of society must add a practical knowledge of details, a skilful handling of existing material, a just understanding of causes and effects, the ability to compose distracting conflicts and to bring the social forces into fruitful coöperation. ”

“ They shall choose men to rule
In every needful faculty,
In church and state and school.
Lo, now! if these poor men
Can govern the land and sea
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be. ”

“ Hence, that in our own Age more than at any previous time, every Citizen, with all his powers, is subjected to the purpose of the State, is thoroughly penetrated by it, and so has become its instrument ”

“ The Republic (like the Politikus) presents to us the march of society with its Principal Cause — its concurrent or Auxiliary Causes — and its inferior governable mass or matter, the human flock, indispensable and co-essential as a part of the whole scheme. ”

“ That which all things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires. ”

“ Just how great must be the advance of society and just what must be the character of the advance, preliminary to its advantageously assuming the autonomous—republican—form of political organisation, must be admitted to be an open question. ”

“ It is difficult in civil life, in statesmanship, to point out the statesman to whom we can ascribe the origin of a principle or a policy, because principles and policies are largely the evolution of time and the creation of many minds and necessities grasped by many actors. ”

“ Can men govern themselves? The affirmative is civilization—the negative is barbarism. The whole trend of modern life—the sweep of modern progress—is towards individual freedom and individual responsibility. ”

“ This object—of which each individual must be conscious—if conceived in the true spirit of statesmanship, comprises the conditions which are decisive for the political and moral future of the State as well as for the livelihood of each individual citizen. ”

“ If, in connection with these solid foundations for a natural religion, we add the important fact, that this is a republic, in which the wish of the majority, should become the law of the mass; we shall discover that politics become the natural channel, through which the wishes of the majority are expressed; that corrupt politics, result in bad government; that pure politics, insure good government; that a wise, just government, is the greatest political benefit which can be conferred on the people governed. ”

“ There are economic and sociological causes for our political vitality and vigor, for the ease and elasticity of our social relations, and for our industrial power and success. Those causes have also produced democracy, given it success, and have made its faults and errors innocuous. ”

“ Shall we not rather take the place to which we are entitled, as the leaders, rather than the followers, in the customs of society, turn back the tide of aristocratic inroads, and carry through the whole, not only of civil and political, but of social and domestic, life, the true principles of democratic freedom and equality? ”

“ If so, whatever qualities in the government are promotive of industry, integrity, justice, and prudence, conduce alike to permanence and to progression, only there is needed more of those qualities to make the society decidedly progressive than merely to keep it permanent.
What, again, are the particular attributes in human beings which seem to have a more especial reference to Progress, and do not so directly suggest the ideas of Order and Preservation? They are chiefly the qualities of mental activity, enterprise, and courage. ”

“ I think it can be said without exaggeration that there has never been in the history of this Republic a political movement in which the purely moral motive was so strong—indeed, so dominant and decisive. ”

“ That form of government which God himself had established, that code of laws which God himself had promulgated, those institutions which infinite wisdom had provided, in special relation to the climate, soil, and situation of the country, to the genius, temper, and character of the people, became intolerable from the prevalence of vice and impiety. It is a trite maxim, that man is governed by hope and fear. ”

“ And, seeing this, we shall infer that the emotion excited in men by embodied political power must now, and for a long-time to come, be a great obstacle to the formation of rational sociological conceptions—tending, as it must ever do, to exaggerate the importance of the political factor in comparison with other factors. ”

“ The first principles of power are in the people; and all the projects of men in power ought to refer to the people, to aim solely at their good, and end in it: And whoever will pretend to govern them without regarding them, will soon repent it. ”

“ Underneath the corporeal and intermittent actions which civil power prescribes and regulates, they govern the imagination, the conscience and the affections, the whole inward being, that mute, persistent effort of which our visible acts are simply the incomplete expressions and rare outbursts. ”

“ 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? ”

“ This accounts for the whole humane movement of modern times toward democracy, toward the breaking of caste and the leveling of class divisions, toward emancipations and enfranchisements, toward equity in institutions and laws, toward common education and toward public and private charities of every kind.
It is not the fact, however, that every man acquires entirely for himself these larger and more intelligent perceptions, which broaden and clarify his notions of right. ”

“ We ask whether the universal institution will improve our (please God) temporary institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have known a man ask seriously, "Does Democracy help the Empire?" Which is like saying, "Is art favourable to frescoes?" ”

“ In the eyes of reason, governments and parties are merely the mise en scène of the fundamental concepts of society, a realization of abstractions, a metaphysical pantomime, from which the direction is Liberty. ”

“ The first of these conditions is that there should be a common political idea in the minds of all men, an idea of the state thought of as the personal possession of each individual and as the backbone fact of his scheme of duties. ”