The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863, page 119 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download120
that these functions should remain distinct, and administered by different bodies. When they are all merged into each other, and rested in a single individual or a single body of individuals, the government is then a despotism. The very essence of what we understand by despotism, is this massing, this fusing together of elements that can properly and justly live and act only when each is at liberty, in freedom to be itself, in order that it may perform its own, its peculiar and appropriate function, in harmonious connection with others performing theirs. Despotism is the binding, compressing, suffocating of individual life; first of the three functions of government, which should always be kept separate, and next, as a natural and inevitable consequence, of those who come under that solidified administration. The nation governed by a despotism must be moulded after the same pattern; it must necessarily have the variety and freedom of its many constituent parts destroyed, and be massed and melted together into a homogeneous and indiscriminate whole; only permeated in all directions by the channels conveying the will of the despotic head.
Thus the province of free government is not to be conceived of as that of restraining, repressing, punishing. This is only its negative function. Its positive office is the very opposite, and is truly a most exalted one. And this is, to remove every barrier to the freest outflow of human energies. It is to give an open field and the widest scope for the play of every human faculty consistent with right. Government does this, by establishing order among multitudes teeming with life and activity--each seeking, in his own way, the broadest vent for his God-given energies. These human energies are given to men for the very purpose that they may flow forth in a thousand modes of activity and industry, and that, thus, men may mutually impart an exalted happiness upon each other. These energies are to be repressed only when they are wrong, when they take a wrong directio