Part 18 (1/2)

13. Any one who understands how morality comes from G.o.d (_Ethics_, c.

vi., s. ii. nn. 6-9, 13, pp. 119-125), can have no difficulty in seeing how civil power is of G.o.d also. The one point covers the other.

We need no mention of G.o.d to show that disobedience, lying, and the seven deadly sins, are bad things for human nature, things to be avoided even if they were not forbidden. All the things that G.o.d forbids are against the good of man. Their being evil is distinguishable from their being prohibited, and antecedent to it. Now as drunkenness and unchast.i.ty are evil for man, so too is anarchy. The one remedy for anarchy is civil government. Even if there were no G.o.d, it would be still imperatively necessary, as we have seen, for mankind to erect political inst.i.tutions, and to abide by the laws and ordinances of const.i.tutional power. But there would be no _formal obligation_ of submission to these laws and ordinances; and resistance to this power would be no more than _philosophic sin_. (_Ethics_, c.

vi., s. ii., n. 6, p. 119.) What makes anarchy truly sinful and wrong is the prohibition of it contained in the Eternal Law, that law whereby G.o.d commands every creature, and particularly every man, to act in accordance with his own proper being and nature taken as a whole, and to avoid what is repugnant to the same. (_Ethics_, c. vi., s. ii., n. 9, p. 120.)

Therefore, as man is naturally social, and anarchy is the dissolution of society, G.o.d forbids anarchy, and enjoins obedience to the civil power, under pain of sin and d.a.m.nation. ”They that resist, purchase to themselves d.a.m.nation” (Rom. xiii. 2): where the theological student, having the Greek text before him, will observe that the same phrase is used as in 1 Cor. xi. 29 of the unworthy communicant, as though it were the like sin to rend our Lord's mystical Body by civil discord as to profane His natural Body by sacrilege. But to enjoin obedience and to bestow authority are the obverse and reverse of one and the same act. G.o.d therefore gives the civil ruler power and authority to command. This is the meaning of St. Paul's teaching that there is no power but from G.o.d, and that the powers that be are ordained of G.o.d.

(Rom. xiii. 1.)

14. The argument is summed up in these seven consequent propositions:

(a) Civil society is necessary to human nature.

(b) Civil power is necessary to civil society.

(c) Civil power is naught without civil obedience.

(d) Civil obedience is necessary to human nature.

(e) G.o.d commands whatever is necessary to human nature.

(f) G.o.d commands obedience to the civil power.

(g) G.o.d commissions the civil power to rule.

15. If any one asks how the State and the civil power is of G.o.d any otherwise than the railway company with its power, or even the fever with its virulence, a moment's reflection will reveal the answer in the facts, that railway communication, however convenient, is not an essential feature of human life, as the State is: while diseases are not requirements in order to good, but incidental defects and evils of nature, permitted by G.o.d. Why G.o.d leaves man to cope with such evils, is not the question here.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Pol_., I., ii.; III., i.; III., ix.: nn. 5-15.

SECTION IV.--_Of the Variety of Polities_.

1. _One polity alone is against the natural law; that is every polity which proves itself unworkable and inefficient: for the rest, various States exhibit various polities workable and lawful, partly from the circ.u.mstances, partly from the choice, of the citizens: but the sum total of civil power is a constant quant.i.ty, the same for all States_.

We proceed to establish the clauses of this statement in succession.

2. If a watch be necessary to a railway guard, and he is bound to have one accordingly, it is also necessary, and he is bound to procure it, that the watch shall go and keep time. A watch that will not keep time is an unlawful article for him to depend upon, being tantamount to no watch, whereas he is bound to have a watch. Otherwise, be his watch large or small, gold, silver, or pinchbeck, all this is indifferent, so long as it be a reliable timekeeper. In like manner, we must have a State, we must have a government, and we must have a government that can govern. Monarchy, aristocracy, parliaments, wide or narrow franchise, centralisation, decentralisation, any one of these and countless other forms--apart from the means whereby it is set up--is a lawful government, where it is a workable one; unlawful, and forbidden by G.o.d and nature, where it cannot work. A form of government that from its own intrinsic defects could nowhere work, would be everywhere and always unlawful.

3. You cannot argue from the accomplished fact the lawfulness of the means whereby it was accomplished. Nor do we say that every form of government, which succeeds in governing, was originally set up in justice; nor again that the success of its rule is necessarily due to the use of just means. The Committee of Public Safety in Paris in 1794 did manage to govern, but it was erected in blood, and it governed by an unscrupulous disregard of everybody's rights. All that we say is, that no distribution of civil power as a distribution, or no polity as a polity (s. iii., n. 5, p. 312), is unlawful, if by it the government can be carried on. And the reason is plain. For all that nature requires is that there should be an efficient civil authority, not that this man should have it, or that one man or other should have it all, or that a certain cla.s.s in council a.s.sembled should engross it, or that all the inhabitants of the country should partic.i.p.ate in it.

Any one of these arrangements that will work, satisfies the exigency of nature for civil rule, and is therefore in itself a lawful polity.

4. Working, and therefore, as explained, lawful polities are as mult.i.tudinous as the species of animals. Besides those that actually are, there is a variety without end, as of animals, so of polities, that might be and are not. We can cla.s.sify only the main types. We ground our cla.s.sification upon Ar., _Pol._, III., vii., modernising it so as to take in forms of representative government, whereof Aristotle had no conception.

(1) _Monarchy_, or the rule of the Single Person, in whose hands the whole power of the State is concentrated, e.g., Constantine the Great.

(2) _Aristocracy_, or the rule of the Few, which will be either _direct_ or _representative_, according as either they themselves by their own votes at first hand, or representatives whom they elect, make the laws.

(3) _Democracy_, or the rule of the Many, that is, of the whole community. Democracy, again, is either _direct_ (commonly called _pure_) or _representative_. The most famous approach in history to pure democracy is the government of Athens, B.C. 438-338.

(4) _Limited Monarchy_.

(a) _Monarchy with Aristocracy_, the government of England from 1688 to 1830.

(b) _Monarchy with Democracy_.

5. All civil government is for the governed, that is, for the community at large. The perversion of a polity is the losing sight of this principle, and the conducting of the polity in the interest of the governing body alone. By such perversion monarchy pa.s.ses into _tyranny_, aristocracy into _oligarchy_, and democracy into _ochlocracy_ or _mob-rule_. It might appear strange that, where the power rests with the whole people collectively, government should ever be carried on otherwise than in the interest of the entire community, did we not remember that the majority, with whom the power rests in a democracy, may employ it to trample on and crush the minority. Thus the Many may worry and hara.s.s the Few, the mean and poor the wealthy and n.o.ble: though commonly perhaps the worrying has been the other way about. Anyhow it is important to observe that there is no polity which of itself, and apart from the spirit in which it is worked, is an adequate safeguard and rock of defence against oppression.