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Why say, 'without government'? Why not rather, 'self-discipline, self-government'? Discipline and government mean things of great value; without which we could not imagine human existence. The only question is, who exercises government over us, and who wields the rod of discipline: whether it is others or we ourselves?"

What is Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a Hero" to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation? It has been said that our system of town meetings made our Revolution possible, by educating the people in self-government.

National independence and popular self-government, although they were intimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-century liberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of complete national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any solution of the question of popular self-government.

According to the Liberal colonial policy of Great Britain, the time had come to cut the cord and let the young nation conduct its own affairs. In 1872 complete self-government was given to it, the Governor, as the representative of the Queen, retaining a nominal unexercised veto upon legislation.

Our first settlers in California had learned self-government and self-control in the school of Protestantism; and when they took possession of that part of the country beyond the limit of Spanish settlements, where there were no laws and no written code, they were a law unto themselves, and the Spanish Americans that gathered about them found more perfect protection to life and property than they had ever before enjoyed.

There was already a Liberal Ministry under Count Arnim, Bismarck's old chief at Aachen; the Prussian troops were being sent to support the people of Schleswig-Holstein in their rebellion against the Danes; the Ministers favoured the aspirations of Poland for self-government; in Prussia there was to be a Constituent Assembly and a new Constitution drawn up by it.

The point at which this exercise of power by a State would be proper need not now be considered, if, indeed, it be a judicial question.... But, if a contingency shall occur which shall render the Indians who reside in a State incapable of self-government, either by moral degradation or a reduction of their numbers, it would undoubtedly be in the power of a State government to extend over them the ægis of its laws." 6 Peters, pp. 593-4.

While the nations were so closely united to Rome by brute force, the subject peoples were agitated by a desire for their ancient independence and self-government.

Thus in all three of the peninsulas of Southern Europe the people were struggling for the right of self-government. The great powers at once took alarm at the rapid spread of revolutionary ideas and proceeded to adopt measures for the suppression of the movements to which these ideas gave rise. At Troppau and Laybach measures were taken for the suppression of the revolutionary movements in Italy.

Already, however, in the first moment, with a true instinct of self-government, they drew together in the cabin of the "Mayflower" in an association to carry out the divine will in society.