to be ardent advocates of political freedom, rejoice in these acts which shackle and gag their antngonists. But I will take, instead, a case more nearly allied to our own.
For less strikingly, and in other ways, but still with sufficient clearness, this same truth is displayed in the United States. I do not refer only to such extreme illustrations of it as were at one time furnished in California; where, along with that complete political freedom which some suppose to be the sole requisite for social welfare, most men lived in perpetual fear for their lives, while others prided themselves on the notches which marked, on the hilts of their pistols, the number of men they had killed. Nor will I dwell on the state of society existing under republican forms in the West, where a white woman is burnt to death for marrying a negro, where secret gangs murder in the night men w r hose conduct they dislike, where mobs stop trains to lynch offending persons contained in them, where the carrying of a revolver is a matter of course, where judges are intimidated and the execution of justice often impracticable. I do but name these as extreme instances of the way in which, under institutions that nominally secuie men from oppression, they may be intolerably oppressed—unable to utter their opinions and to conduct their private lives as they please. Without going so far we may find in the Eastern States proof enough that the forms of liberty and the reality of liberty are not necessarily commensurate. A state of things under which men administer justice in their own cases, are applauded for so doing, and mostly acquitted if tried, is a state of things which has, in so far, retrograded toward a less civilized state; for one of the cardinal traits of political progress is the gradual disappearance of personal retaliation, and the increasing supremacy of a ruling power which settles the differences between individuals and punishes aggressors. And, in proportion as this ruling power is enfeebled, the security of individuals is lessened. That security, lessened in this general way, is lessened in more special ways, we see in the bribery of judges, in the financial frauds by which many are robbed without possibility of remedy, in the corruptness of New York administration, which, taxing so heavily, does so little. And, under another aspect, we see the like in the doings of legislative bodies—in the unfair advantages which some individuals gain over others by "lobbying" in Crédit-Mobilier briberies, and the like. While the outside form of free government remains, there has grown up within it a reality which makes government not free. The body of professional politicians, entering public life to get incomes, organizing their forces, and developing their tactics, have, in fact, come to be a ruling class quite different from that which the Constitution intended to secure; and a class having interests by no means identical with public interests. The worship of the appliances to liberty, in place of liberty itself, needs continually exposing. There is no intrinsic virtue in votes. The possession of representatives is
