In the foregoing pages, I have offered an analysis of the Hebrew constitution, such as I conceive it to have been, when it came from the hand of the inspired Hebrew lawgiver. The constitution contained a provision that, when the Israelites came into the promised land, it should be submitted to the people, and formally accepted by them all. They were to be assembled in an amphitheater formed by two mountains--Ebal, a bleak, frowning rock, towering on one side, and Gerizim, springing up covered with verdure and beauty on the other. The one height was a prophetic monument of the prosperity and loveliness which would follow the observance of these institutions, the other of the barrenness and desolation which a disregard of the constitution would inevitably bring upon the nation. There the tribes, when the proper time came, were ranged in order, and listened to its provisions; and there they signified their acceptance of it by an act of free choice, which was binding on them and their children forever.
The Hebrew constitution, in its substance and its forms, in its letter and its spirit, was eminently republican. The power of the people was great and controlling. This point is clear, even on a superficial examination of the subject. But not only so, it had also important and striking analogies with our own constitution, and with that other free constitution, from which ours, in its most essential features, was taken--a constitution which Montesquieu erroneously represents as drawn from the woods of Germany, but which Salvador, and truly without doubt, regards as derived from the Hebrew fountains. Whoever attentively considers the Hebrew and British constitutions, and still more the Hebrew and American constitutions, cannot but be impressed with the resemblance between them. Their fundamental principles are identical, and many of the details of organization are the same or similar.
The rights of every person in the Hebrew state, from the head of the nation to the humblest stranger, were accurately defined and carefully guarded. Even Ahab, an unprincipled tyrant, dared not invade the field of a vinedresser, though the want of it was so keenly felt as to make him refuse his ordinary food; and his still more tyrannical and principled queen, Jezebel, knew no method of compassing the same end, but through the perverted forms of law and justice.1 Every man was, in a political sense, on an equality with the most exalted of the nation. The rulers were raised to the dignities which they enjoyed by the free suffrages of their fellow citizens. The laws, though proposed by God, were approved and enacted by the people, through their representatives, in the states-general of Israel. The Israelites exercised the right of meeting in primary assemblies, of discussing questions of public policy, and of petitioning their rulers for the redress of grievances. Every Hebrew citizen was eligible to the highest civil dignities, even to that of the royal purple. The whole nation constituted a republic of freemen, equal originally even in property, equal in political dignity and privilege, equal in their social standing, and equally entitled to the care and protection of the government.
The Hebrew polity was essentially a system of self-government. It is the government of individual independence, municipal independence, and state independence--subject only to so much of central control as was necessary to constitute a true nationality and to provide the general defense and welfare. Centralization was eminently foreign to its spirit. The local governments loom out under the Mosaic institution; the central government is proportionately overshadowed. Herein the Hebrew constitution remarkably resembles our own, and as remarkably differs from other ancient polities. All the ancient Asiatic governments, and most of the European, were great centralizers. With them, almost everything originated and terminated in a center. The Greek democracies can scarcely be regarded as an exception to this rule; the Roman commonwealth certainly was not.
Public opinion was a powerful element in the Hebrew government. This gave shape and force both to the national and provincial administrations. Let anyone read the Hebrew history with this in his mind, and he will see proofs of it in every page. If called upon for a single decisive proof of the strength of the popular will under this constitution, I would select the change in the government from the republican to the regal form. Samuel was against this change. The oracle was against it.2 The council of Moses was against it. The opinion and practice of a long line of illustrious chiefs were against it. It is a reasonable presumption that a strong party of the wisest spirits of the state was against it. Yet the change was made. How and why? The people willed it; the people decreed it; and so it was. What more pregnant argument could there be of the authority and energy with which the collective will of the nation uttered and enforced its resolves? The quiet submission of the whole nation to the will of the majority, after the intense excitement of the struggle through which it must have passed, reminds me more strongly than anything else in history, of a presidential election among ourselves, which is ever accompanied with a like convulsion of the public mind, and a like subsequent acquiescence and repose of the defeated party.
It is an admitted fact that the tendency of all the modern improvements in government is to equalize the conditions of men, and so to bring about that general social intercourse by which many of the most important principles and habits are formed and fixed, and the masses of society are elevated, humanized, and refined. To secure these great ends, many bloody wars have been waged, and countless treasures expended. But all these struggles and expenditures have not yet, in the particulars just indicated, brought modern society to that point where Moses fixed his people, in an age when even the Greeks and the Romans were still savages and barbarians. Privileged classes, enjoying the benefit of milder laws and special exemptions, were unknown to the Mosaic constitution. Neither patent of nobility nor benefit of clergy found any place among its provisions. And civil liberty--according to the notion of it presented in the excellent definitions of Blackstone, Paley, and other approved writers on public law, that it is no other than natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws (and no farther), as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public, that it is the not being restrained by any law but what conduces in a greater degree to the public welfare, and that it consists in a freedom from all restraints except such as established law imposes for the good of the community--liberty, I say, thus regulated by law, with the superadded idea that the restraining laws should be equal to all, was as fully developed and secured by the Hebrew constitution as by any other known system of government in the world. The great natural rights of personal security, in respect to life, limb, health, and reputation; of personal liberty, in respect to locomotion, residence, education, and the choice of occupation; and of private property, in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save by the laws of the land; were recognized and guarded, in the amplest manner, by the laws and constitution of Moses. And these absolute and paramount rights were protected, and their inviolability maintained, by other subordinate rights--the right of representation in the congregation of Israel, the right of a speedy and impartial administration of justice through the courts, and the right of petitioning the public authorities for the redress of wrongs where other means of establishing the right were inadequate to the purpose. Such were the liberties of a Hebrew citizen, such the barriers by which they were defended, such the inestimable system of public polity and law which spread its ample and beneficent protection over the humblest and meanest, as well as the most exalted and honored member of the commonwealth of Israel.
The two greatest interests of a state, and yet the two interests most difficult to be harmonized--permanence and progress--were as wisely provided for and as effectually secured by the Mosaic system of government as by any other civil constitution in the world--the former, by regulations respecting the distribution and tenure of landed property; the latter, by the three annual assemblages of the nation, where there was kept up a continual circulation of ideas between all parts the country; and both, by the institution of the Levitical order, which as at once conservative and progressive--conservative, by its duty to teach, interpret, and maintain the laws; progressive, by its obligation to devote itself to the cultivation of science and letters.
Is it not a fact well worthy to arrest attention, that, in the midst of barbarism and darkness, hearing no sounds but those of violence, and seeing no soil which was not drenched with blood, a legislator should have founded a government on principles of peace, justice, equality, humanity, liberty, and social order, carried out as far as in the freest governments now existing among men? This would be an inexplicable mystery on any other theory than that of a supernatural revelation to the lawgiver. The reality of the divine legation of Moses might be rested on this argument alone. And whoever holds to the divinity of his mission, and therefore necessarily believes that a constitutional and representative democracy is a form of government stamped with the seal of the divine approbation, while the monarchy was a concession to the folly of the people, will thence derive a new and forcible argument to cherish and defend the precious charter of our own liberties, since its type and model came originally from the depths of the divine wisdom and goodness.
I have sometimes imagined all the legislators of America gathered into one vast assemblage, and the Jewish lawgiver appearing suddenly in their midst. "Gentlemen," he might say to them, "at length my word is fulfilled. What you boast of doing now, I accomplished, as far as in me lay, in a distant age. I broke the doors of the house of bondage, and proclaimed the principle of universal equality among men. I substituted for castes and privileged classes, a nation of freemen, and for arbitrary and capricious impositions, the reign of law, equal and universal. I preferred peace to war, general competence and happiness to the false glory of arms, substantial blessings to airy nothings. My highest efforts were constantly directed to procure for all the citizens the greatest equality practicable, both of the labors and enjoyments of life; for the whole commonwealth of Israel, lands well cultivated, good habitations, rich herds, and a population healthy, numerous, enlightened, pious, and contented. It is false, what ignorance and irreligion have charged against me, that I held in abhorrence, after the example of Egypt, foreign nations. No other legislator in the world has ever shown to the stranger an equal justice, an equal tenderness, with myself. Nor is this all. I earnestly labored to secure a universal intellectual equality. Far from being jealous of the superiority which God and the discipline of my faculties had given me, I nourished the animating hope that all the lights which I possessed would one day become the common property of all, even the humblest of my fellow creatures. Laws, not men, were the rulers of my republic; consent, not force, the basis of my government. Conquests and servitude, magnificent palaces and servitude--behold a brief but true picture of the governments by which I was surrounded. It is a libel upon my name and memory to charge me with having framed my institutions upon the model of those stupendous systems of fraud and tyranny. By the wisdom of my counsels and the energy of my policy, I overthrew, at a blow, the whole degrading apparatus of political jugglery and priestly despotism. I reduced the speculative ideas of my own and the preceding ages to a single sublime principle of simplicity. I recognized the happiness and well-being of the people as the one supreme law of political philosophy. By the institutions founded upon this principle, I impressed a new character upon my age and species; I gave a new impulse to man, both in his individual and social energies: I fixed upon my labors the indestructible seal of a divine wisdom and benefice. Forward, then, gentlemen, without fear or faltering, in the doctrine of Jehovah--in those great principles of free and equal government, which, taught by the Divine Spirit, I first promulgated to the world; and to which, after so many ages of tyranny and misgovernment, you have at length returned. Cling to these principles, legislators of a world that had no being when I founded my republic. Give them a broader development, a higher activity; and the civilization, the prosperity, the happiness flowing from them, shall outstrip your fond hopes, and more than realize the brightest vision of bard or prophet."
Such is the spirit that speaks to us, of this distant age and clime, in the Mosaic constitution. It is a spirit of faith, hope, charity. There are some who entertain apprehensions concerning the issue of our political experiment and who doubt the capacity of the people for self-government. For myself, I have no such fear. My faith in our institutions has been strengthened by my study of the Hebrew constitution. I have seen with surprise and delight that the essential principles of our constitution are identical with those of a political system which emanated from a superhuman wisdom and was established by the authority of the supreme ruler of the world. I accept this knowledge as a pledge, that these principles are destined, in the good providence of God, to a universal triumph. Men are capable of governing themselves; such is the decision of the infinite intelligence. Tyranny will everywhere come an end; humanity will recover its rights; and the entire race of mankind will exult in the enjoyment of freedom and happiness. Futurity is big with events of momentous import--events, I verily believe, compared with which the grandest and the sublimest, hitherto inscribed upon the rolls of fame, are but as insignificant trifles. But this better future, for which our nature sighs, and to which it is evidently tending, "is not a tree transplanted from paradise, with all its branches in full fruitage. It was not sowed in sunshine. It is not in vernal breezes and gentle rains that its roots are fixed, and its growth and strength insured. With blood was it planted. It is rocked in tempests. Deep scars are on its trunk, and the path of the lightning may traced among its branches." But, through storm and darkness, amid blood and carnage, the political redemption of our race holds on its course. Liberty and law, Christianity and science, religion and learning, are yet to enjoy a universal triumph, to sway a universal scepter. The day is to come when human nature, relieved from the pressure imposed upon it by the abuses of ancient dynasties, shall start afresh, with unimpeded and elastic tread, on its destined race of improvement and perfectibility. Thanks be to God for that rainbow of promise, with which the civil polity of Moses has spanned the political heavens!
NOTES:
1 1 Kings 21. 2 The oracle did, indeed, give its assent, but reluctantly.
