Age III

The English historian, essayist and politician was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire. Macauley was called to the bar and joined the Northern circuit, be he soon gave up even the pretence of reading law, and spent many more hours under the gallery of the house of commons than in the court. His first attempt at a public speech, made at an anti-slavery meeting in 1824, was described by the Edinburg Review as “a display of eloquence of rare and matured excellence.” The first two volumes of the History of England appeared in December 1848. Within a generation of its first appearance upwards of 140,000 copies of the History were printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone, and in the United States the stales were on a corresponding large scale. The History was translated into German, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian, Italian, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Macaulay’s was the mind of the advocate, not of the philosopher. The historian, no less than the politician was however, always on the side of justice – fairness for the weak against the strong, oppressed against the oppressor. But through a liberal practice in practical politics, he had not the reformer’s temperament. The world as it was at the time was good enough for him. The glories of wealth, rank, honors, literary fame, the elements of vulgar happiness made up his ideal of life.

French economist Frederic Bastiat was the son of a merchant. He published his first panphlet in 1834, and between 1841 and 1844 three others all on questions of taxation affecting local interests. Later, he wrote in rapid succession a series of brilliant and effective pamphlet and essays, showing how socialism was connected with protection, and exposing the delusions on which it rested. Overall, the life-work of Bastiat requires to be considered in three aspects: 1. He was an advocate of free-trade, the opponent of protection. The general principles of free-trade had been clearly stated and solidly established before he was born, but he did more than merely restate them. He showed, as no one before him had done, how they wre practically applicable to French agrilculture, trade and commerce. 2. He was the opponent of socialism. In this respect, he had no equal among the economists of France. He alone fought socialism by not denouncing or criticizing it under its name as an abstract theory, but taking it as actually presented by its most popular representatives, considering patiently their proposals and arguments, and proving conclusively that they proceeded on false principles, reasoned badly and sought to realize generous aims by foolish and harmful means. 3. And lastly, he attempted to expound in an orginal and independent manner political economy as science.

American poet and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches. Among them were some of those men of mark who made the backbone of the American character. He was brought up in an atmosphere of hard work, of moral discipline, and (after his father’s death in 1811) of that wholesome self-sacrifice which is a condition of life for those who are poor in money and rich in spirit. Independence, sincerity, reality, grew more and more necessary to him. This led to him wanting to make a difference, with politics being the avenue to do so. He believed that the less government we have, the better — the fewer laws, the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy. 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. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary.

Alexis de Tocqueville was brought up for the bar, or rather for the bench, and became an assistant magistrate in 1830. A year later he obtained from the government a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in America, and proceeded thither with his life-long friend Gustave de Beaumont. He returned in less than two years, and published a report, but the real result of his tour was the famous De la Democratic en Amerique, which appeared in 1835, and very soon made his reputation. During the last twenty years of his life, and for perhaps half that time after his death, Tocqueville had an increasing European fame. His manner, which is partly imitated from Montesquieu, has considerable charm, and he was the first and has remained the chief writer to put the orthodox liberal ideas which governed European politics during the first half or two-thirds of the 19th century into an orderly and attractive shape. He was, moreover, as has been said, much taken up by influential persons in England – N. W. Senior, John Stuart Mill and others – and he had the great advantage of writing absolutely the first book of reasoned politics on democratic government in America.

English philosopher and economist, son of James Mill, was born in his father’s house in Pentonville, London. He was educated, exclusively by his father, who was a strict disciplinarian, and at the age of three was taught the Greek alphabet and long lists of Greek words with their English equivalents. Not unnaturally the training which the younger Mill received has aroused amazement and criticism, and it is reasonable to doubt whether the mate- rial knowledge which he retained the result was as valuable to him as his father imagined. It is important, however, to note that the really important part of the training was the close association which it involved with the strenuous character and vigorous intellect of his father. “One of the grand objects of education,” according to the elder Mill, “should be to generate a constant and anxious concern about evidence.” The duty of collecting and weighing evidence for himself was at every turn impressed upon the boy; he was taught to accept no opinion on authority. He was deliberately educated as an apostle, but it was as an apostle of reasoned truth in human affairs, not as an apostle of any system of dogmatic tenets.

Sixteenth president of the United States of America, was born on “Rock Spring” farm, 3 miles from Hodenville, in Hardin (now Larue) county, Kentucky. Schools were rare, and teachers qualified only to impart the merest rudiments. “Of course afterward – still somehow I could read, write and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.” His entire schooling, in five different schools, amounted to less than a twelvemonth; but he became a good speller and an excellent penman. On the 16”’ of June 1858 by unanimous resolution of the Republican state convention Lincoln was declared “the first and only choice of the Republicans” who was the choice of his own party to succeed himself. Lincoln, addressing the convention which nominated him, gave expression to the following bold prophecy : “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

American orator and journalist, was born in Tuckahoe, Talbot county, Maryland, probably in February 1817. His mother was a negro slave of exceptional intelligence, and his father was a white man. For the sake of greater safety he soon removed to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Douglass. For three years he worked as a day laborer in New Bedford. An extempore speech made by him before an anti-slavery meeting at Nantucket, Mass., in August 1841 led to his being appointed one of the agents of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and in this capacity he delivered during the next four years numerous addresses against slavery. From 1847 to 1860 he conducted an anti-slavery weekly journal, known as The North Star, and later as Frederick Douglas’s Paper, at Rochester, New York, and, during this time, also was a frequent speaker at anti-slavery meetings. During the Civil War he was among the first to suggest the employment of negro troops by the United States government, and two of his sons served in the Union army. After the war he was for several years a popular public lecturer. He was widely known for his eloquence, and was one of the most effective orators in America.

American recluse, naturalist and writer, was born at Concord, Massachusetts. It was in 1845 he made the now famous experiment of Walden. He read considerably, wrote abundantly, thought actively if not widely, and came to know beasts, birds and fishes with an intimacy more extraordinary than was the case with St Francis of Assisi. Some years before Thoreau took to Walden woods he made the chief friendship of his life, that with Emerson. He became one of the famous circle of the transcendentalists, always keenly preserving his own individuality amongst such more or less potent natures as Emerson, Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller. From Emerson he gained more than from any man, alive or dead, and, though the older philosopher both enjoyed and learned from the association with the younger, it cannot be said that the gain was equal. “I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least”, and I would like to see it acted up more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Herbert Spencer was one of the last men to attempt—in Francis Bacon’s phrase—“to take all knowledge for his province.” Spencer was a believer in individualism over bureaucracy and the extension of governmental powers over the lives and actions of private citizens. His labours coincided in time with the great development of biology under the stimulus of the Darwinian theory, and the sympathizers with the new views, feeling the need of a comprehensive survey of the world as a whole, very widely accepted Spencer’s philosophy at its own valuation, both in England and, still more, in America. To the theory of knowledge Spencer contributes a “transfigured realism,” to mediate between realism and idealism, and the doctrine that “necessary truths,” acquired in experience and congenitally transmitted, are a priori to the individual, though a posteriori to the race, to mediate between empiricism and apriorism. To Herbert Spencer there was little difference between enslavement of the mind and enslavement of the body… All forms of enslavement react upon the slaveholder, and a society founded on force can not evolve—and not to evolve is to die. Herbert Spencer accepted the doctrine that each individual has the right to preserve himself. Indeed, he saw in nature a struggle in which the fittest survived and the less fit perished. Thus, men must be free to struggle and provide their fitness to survive.

Lord Action was an English historian and a master of the chief foreign languages. He began at an early age to collect a magnificent historical library, with the object, never in fact realized, of writing a great History of Liberty. Acton’s political ideas have been compared with those of Burke and Tocqueville. All three were concerned with the practical conditions favoring liberty, and were suspicious of the rationalist frame of mind which desired to impose liberty, as a ready-made set of doctrines, upon a supposedly compliant and reasonable society. They feared men’s power more than they trusted men’s ideals. They anticipated no miracle of happiness on earth, no “heavenly city” such as the eighteenth century philosophers dreamt of: Instead they distrusted these dreams. The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people.