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EDITOR'S PREFACE.

THE political writings of Dr. Brownson, collected in these four volumes, extend over a period of nearly forty years, from 1837 to 1875. They begin when the author was thirty-four years old, and end with his seventy-second year. When the earliest articles were written he belonged to the radical or movement party both in religion and politics. In those days he held that the people are infallible and humanity divine; and the main object of his writing and preaching was to throw out views however crude and erroneous which he believed would stimulate thought and arouse intellectual activity. The truth, he said, would live, and the error perish. The infallible people would always be able to distinguish between them and accept only what is true.

Accordingly there are many views and expressions to be found in the earlier writings originating, for the most part, in an erroneous theology, which the author afterwards repudiated, and which he exposed and combated in The Convert, The American Republic, and here and there in his other writings. But, as a general rule, his political opinions on all the great questions discussed, such as the origin and ground of government, the evil tendency of popular democracy, the distinction between this and our American system of constitutional republicanism, and opposition to privilege and monopoly and class legislation, continued unaltered through life. He had prior to 1837 embraced in its full extent the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the people in their own right, and had advocated the social as well as the civil and political equality of all men. His sympathies were always with the weaker class, with the wronged and the oppressed. Accordingly in 1830 he labored in support of what was called the Working-Men's party, though in a moral and social, rather than a political, aspect. From 1831 to 1837 he paid little or no attention to politics. The Democratic party did not go far enough for him in carrying out the principle of social democracy.

The suspension of the banks in 1837, and the special legislation in favor of moneyed corporations which followed, aroused his strongest opposition, and led him to examine deeply and thoroughly the elementary principles of politics, the basis of government in general, and the character of our American government. The results of this study he published during seven or eight years following in the Boston Quarterly and the Democratic Reviews.

He supported the Democratic party, at this time, as the state-rights party, and agreed with its doctrines concerning banks and banking, with its maintenance of equal rights, and with its opposition to privilege

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and monopoly. He endeavored to make a distinct issue between the interests of associated and corporate wealth, that is to say, of the business and trading classes on the one side, and the interests of labor, agricultural, mechanical, &c., on the other. This he called the issue of man against money. The result of the elections in 1840 convinced him that money will always carry it over man, and he abandoned that issue, and instead of separating the interests of business and labor, he sought so to unite them as to secure equal rights to all with special privileges to none, and to make each in promoting its own interests contribute to the promotion of the interests of both.

For this purpose such practical guaranties are necessary as will prevent the government, whatever the doctrines or tendencies of the party in power, from becoming an instrument of injury to individual rights or the rights of minorities. Democracy has for its fundamental principle the right of the majority to govern without any restraint on its will. Jefferson confessedly violated the constitution, Madison claimed that the repeated exercise of unconstitutional power acquiesced in by the people became legitimate, Jackson set aside the constitution by claiming the right to interpret it for himself, and the Whigs, after their success in the elections of 1840, under the lead of Henry Clay proposed such amendments to the constitution as would remove all restraint on the arbitrary will of the majority for the time being. The author's aim was then to restrain the majority, or class in power, from oppressing and plundering other classes. His first step was to examine the demo- . cratic principle, that the people are the origin or source of power and that government is "of the people, from the people, and by the people," as Mr. Lincoln expressed it in his famous Gettysburg oration.

There is nothing in Dr. Brownson's writings more remarkable than these early essays, in which he refutes the theories of Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, &c., and establishes the divine right of government, and the providential constitution of the state anterior to the written constitution. In defending constitutional government against popular democracy, he secures the basis of individual freedom, and in the divine right of government the foundation of lawful authority. The unrestrained will of the sovereign in all absolute governments, monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, is despotism, and there is freedom only where this will is limited and restrained by the constitution, whether written or unwritten. Anarchy is repressed and lawful authority is sustained under whatever form constituted, by the assertion that all power is from God, and he that resists it purchases damnation to himself. So long as the government rules justly, in accordance with God's law, its commands bind in conscience, and anarchy and revolution are unlawful. Where the government becomes tyrannical, resistance is lawful and may be a duty, and in this is the safeguard of liberty. Many of these essays are only the application of the principle of obedience to lawful authority, and the right of opposing despotic governinent, condemning, on the

one hand, red-republicanism, socialism, and revolutionism, and on the other, absolute government and cæsarism.

The most noteworthy change in the author's views of the political questions which he discussed from first to last, is on the question of state and national sovereignty. For years he advocated the doctrine that the political sovereignty inheres in the several states, and that the United States have only a delegated authority, as the agent for certain specified purposes of a general nature of these sovereign states. He held the doctrine of nullification, or the right of a state to declare a law of congress null and void within its limits, and was even disposed to admit the right of a state to secede, though he maintained that it would be a breach of faith for a state to withdraw from the Union. But the rebellion and secession of some of the southern states, and his attempt to justify the federal government in making war on them and coercing them back into the Union, led him to revise his opinion in regard to the seat of sovereignty in our system, and to hold that the United States are a sovereign nation, the component parts of which are states, not individuals, thus asserting national sovereignty, but also at the same time, all the rights of the states under it.

Agitation for the abolition of slavery in the states where the law authorized it, he opposed as inconsistent with the rights of those states and their independence in their local affairs, and also as threatening a dissolution of the Union. But he was equally opposed to the attempt to extend slavery into the territories, or to make the slaveholding interest the ruling interest of the nation. He would not violate the constitution and dissolve the Union in order to abolish slavery, but when by secession the slave states deprived themselves of the federal protection for their property, he was among the earliest, most forcible, and most persistent advocates of emancipation, both as a war measure and as a matter of justice.

The evils that have followed emancipation have been the natural result of federal interference in the local affairs of the states concerned, Every war tends to strengthen the centralizing tendency and to reduce the states to the condition of counties or departments. In supporting the authority of the general government we are in danger of forgetting the rights of individuals and states, and now, as after the war with Great Britain in 1812, we are running with fearful speed towards centralization, or a consolidated democracy, as alien to the American system of government as a monarchy or aristocracy would be.

Among the most important questions of national policy discussed is that of free-trade or protection. The argument against the protective policy is strongly put, but as a question of policy no solution is possible that will admit of universal application. It may be best for the particular interests of one nation, and not of another, or for the same nation at one time and under certain circumstances, and not at another time and ander different circumstances. The author in his later writings main

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