Right, is the proper aim of war; not the negative boon of order without conflict, but the positive establishment of a just equilibrium of relations. Peace, no doubt, attends on justice; but cannot be its end, because freely sacrificed on its behalf. Amid these indications of unsettled thought in public men, we do not hesitate to say that, crude and often inadmissible as may be the dicta of international law, they at least attempt a problem of whose conditions their critics scarce conceive, and draw the first tentative lines of a real morality of nations.

It is a curious fact, that in the organised doctrines of our times, we have no provision for justifying the affections, and establishing the duties of the citizen. No church, no creed, recognises political ethics; and they are left to struggle into hap-hazard existence through the irresistible pressure of usage. Religious persons are shy of politics; remain in a state of uneasy relation to them; consider patriotism as decidedly heathenish; and are usually withdrawn, by the force of personal piety, into quite another sphere. Hence no reverential feeling touches the civic relations: they are abandoned to the secular spirit to work out: and fall under the influence of the extreme individualism which threatens modern society with anarchy. No doubt, the cause of this is to be found in the turn given to European thought in the sixteenth century. The antithesis set up by the Reformers between Law and Gospel removed from the State whatever was sacred, and from the Church whatever was human; and giving the soul to the latter, left only "body and goods" for the former: and so produced materialism in politics as a counterpart to spiritualism in religion. In reaction from a theocracy which domineered over all civil life, arose a faith that grew too enthusiastic to touch it. Moreover, by insisting on the need of personal faith, and making everything hinge on the separate relation which men, taken one by one, sustained to God, Protestantism reduced the world to an atomic constitution; with nothing between the universal Humanity collectively redeemed by Christ, and the particular individuals successively appropriating (or failing to appropriate) his sacrifice. Heaven had its controversy with two forms of being, and recognised no other;-with the whole race, condemned in the type, and ransomed in the type; and with each single soul in its own probationary hour. Thus, before the eye of reality mankind lie resolved at once into their ultimate components: the life of the world is but the aggregate of private lives: intermediate groupings, by language, by class, by lineage, by native land, are accidents of no account: and any study or pursuit that makes much of these things is a carnal affair, fascinating only to the "old Adam." It is easy to see that, in this mode of thought,

historical relations have no recognition, and nations no moral existence; and to speak of them as objects of affection or grounds of obligation betrays the illusion of the unregenerate mind.

This is the origin of the low modern doctrine of politics; not perhaps improved by the substitution of faith in free-trade for the zeal of free religion. The practical exemplification of its tendency was already copiously afforded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are accustomed to regard the Puritans as the founders of our modern liberties: nor do we err in this; yet we have reason to thank God that their success was not greater, and that the true English instinct barred their further way. They cared little for their country, except as a theatre for their faith that they belonged to it was one of the accidents of nature which they despised, and was indifferent to the ordinances of grace which they revered. It was only in their secular offices and relations that they had attachment to the land in their spiritual life,-which alone was real,-they transcended all local ties. Cromwell, the Huntingdon brewer, was an Englishman: but Cromwell, the saint, was one of the Lord's people. Coligny, the Admiral, was citizen of France: but Coligny, the Huguenot, aimed, on behalf of his sect, at an imperium in imperio, with which no national government could coexist; and demanded for them separate fortresses, and guarantees, and institutions, which would have destroyed all Gallican unity, and virtually established two federated nations encamped upon the same soil. The sympathies of the Protestants were with each other all over the world, and not with the land of their birth and the institutions of their inheritance. Politically, they had their strife at home, their friendships abroad. Their correspondence, their preachers, their literature, were European. They prayed passionately for their "brethren," tamely for their country;-whose history they cared not to study; whose ornamental arts they despised; whose poetry was too warm with the blood of generous life for them; whose cathedrals they stripped and whitewashed; whose lordly timbers they cut; and whose whole past they would have cleansed away as a mass of Babylonish horrors. Their aim, in short, was not patriotic, but cosmopolitan; not so much to guard the honour and unity of England, as to gather the whole world into an Evangelical Alliance. Had they fully triumphed in their aim, and shorn the flowing locks which history had grown so richly and so long, this earth would have presented a dismal and an ugly spectacle. As it is, they balanced their many services by bequeathing to us a poor and narrow doctrine of politics, which empties out from them every noble colouring of

moral desire, and reduces government to an organization of police; which makes the state exist for the mere claims of individuals, without reciprocal devotion of the individual to the ennoblement of the commonwealth; and which totally detaches all religious sentiment, all historical knowledge and enthusiasm, from the criticism and estimate of public affairs, and tries them, regardless of the special genius and duty of a people, by the standards of a material selfishness or an abstract philanthropy.

We object altogether to the habit, formed on theological suggestion, of deducing concrete political doctrine from general principles of human nature and assumed rights of individual men. Of universal morals and religion these, doubtless, are the proper ground: nor can any political theory be permitted to contradict the affirmations of human conscience and faith; it must construct itself within these comprehensive conditions. But if we deal with the inhabited world,-or any portion of it,as all made up of individuals; if we study it in tables of popu lation and statistics of trade, and conclude that, while these show no convulsion, all things continue essentially the same; if we pretend that one man naturally weighs as much as another, and so herd them together in electoral penfolds; if we look at each country as an area computed to feed so many people and raise so much produce, and suppose that this being given, the human affairs will settle themselves; we shall miss the chief phenomena which we have to account for in the past, and apply for the future. The proximate factors of each commonwealth are not in its single citizens, but in its natural and therefore permanent classes of men; each determined, by distinct occupation and opportunity, to a peculiar aspect of character, and a special direction of taste and desire. The land, the mill, the sea, the shop, the Court, the Church, the management of capital, the exercise of personal skill, are so many schools of habit and sentiment, that will persist, while persons and families pass away, and make themselves felt as the true moral constituents of an abiding State. Each of these apprehends and brings to light some phase of human life more or less latent to the rest, and elicits aptitudes else unsuspected: and though they are all, when separately taken, eccentric in relation to the balancepoint of perfect wisdom and excellence, yet collectively they are so grouped round it as to indicate whereabouts it lies. Under condition of not domineering over the others, or contravening any moral law, each has a right to assert its place, and even to regard it with some pride as a providential trust, held as an element of the country's good: nor is there a surer test of political health, than the free manifestation, without insolence and without shame, of its own character and conscience, by every natural and durable class.

Similarly, only more decisively, the organism of the world's life is made up, not of individuals, but of nations; all amenable, it is true, to one Divine Law of Right; but with insight into it from different sides, and strongly discriminated by features morally neutral. Moreover, their vitality, their interest for history, their contribution to the civilization of the world, evidently spring not from what they have in common with all mankind, but from what is special to themselves. What fire would have touched the genius of the Greek if he had felt himself undistinguished from the barbarian? What actually did become of him, though petted by Roman patronage and rewarded with Roman gold, when he tried his wits again at Alexandria, amid the motley congeries of peoples pretending to be one? The flame, once of so etherial a clearness, all turned to mere illuminated smoke. Talk as we may of human brotherhood, affection is not and cannot be universal, but always fixes on the specific: and whoever attempts to work the problems of society from the abstract end, inverts the order of Providence, and leaves to the last the only forces with which he can make a beginning. The distinctive genius of nations is no accident: the plurality of languages is no curse: even antagonism of tendency implies no failure, but only the negative resistance, which tests and elicits the forces of higher life. Who would exchange the running waters of a local literature, descending and sparkling from the native uplands of any gifted tribe, for tasteless drafts from the tank of a universal language? A people's history and character are determined, not by its science, which is universal, and would be everywhere at home, but by its poetry, its arts, its admirations, its humour, which a degree of latitude or a few centuries of time may render foreign : and an epic or a song, short as its living duration must be, may have a human power greater than the Porisms or the Principia. The endowments and opportunities of each civilized people, then, whether natural or inherited, constitute at once a trust for the world and a right for itself: they are entitled to exist, so long as they respect the limits of the moral law; being there on the same terms with the genius of the artist or the inspiration of the poet in private life. And identified, as they always must be, with the whole national ideal of what is best, intermingled with the affections and conscience of the people, there is not only an instinct, but an obligation, to vindicate and uphold them as a Divine deposit which it were faithless to betray.

This principle is frequently conceded, with the stipulation that the claim shall not be pushed beyond the limits of "selfdefence." But what is a nation's "self"?-where are we to look

for that personal essence, under change of which she would no longer be the same? Not surely in her coasts and fields; for they were geographically there before she had a name among human things. Not in her buildings and their stores; for these she has created and can recreate. Not in the sinews of her peasants or the lives of her children of to-day; for they are but for one generation, the transient representatives of her longevity; but rather in the physiognomy of her arts and literature, the spirit of her laws, the pride of her traditions, the honourable aims she has borne through her noblest time, and whose standard she has never surrendered. These constitute the proper type of a nation's historical identity; and whoever touches these by assault or weakens them by insult, as truly hurts her to the quick and challenges her "selfdefence" as if he sent an armada to her shores. To every nature it is given to vindicate its own essence; and the impulse which starts into defensive attitude at impalpable and moral aggression is more truly reasonable and noble than the materialistic scruple which stands still till a blow is delivered on the body.

In claiming a right, we acknowledge a personality. Nor is it a mere fiction of jurists that deals with States as persons. God and reality deal with them as such, endowing them with the attributes and visiting them with the liabilities of moral agents. And they themselves accept and acknowledge this character of continuous responsibility in the forms and organism of their life; covering over the semblance of interruption, and giving perpetuity of aspect and will by the device of hereditary sovereignty; handing down obligations with good faith from age to age; making binding engagements, asserting indefeasible rights, appealing to a common consciousness, without regard to the lapse of time or the change of all the actual men. That retribution for public wrong strides by centuries, and stepping over the guilty generation crushes often the individually-innocent successors, implies a collective accountability quite distinct from the cycle of private duty,—a law of too deliberate beat for biographic measurement, but whose solemn pulsations are felt through history. Certain it is that the Moral Governor of the world does treat a nation as if it were a person;-calling it to account as identical when not a creature in it remains the same, and crowning it with recompense when the heroes that earned it have made way for degenerate heirs. Is this moral personality a fiction, then? Does God act upon a quasi? If so, who shall tell us what is real?

We reject, then, the doctrine of mere individualism, as the source of confusion in political thought, and of a mischievous