THE FORCE BILL.
“Mr. Speaker: I am not able to understand the mental organization of the man who can consider this bill, and the subject of which it treats, as free from very great difficulties. He must be a man of very moderate abilities, whose ignorance is bliss, or a man of transcendant genius whom no difficulties can daunt and whose clear vision no cloud obscures.
“The distinguished gentleman [Mr. Shellabarger] who introduced the bill from the committee, very appropriately said that it requires us to enter upon unexplored territory. That territory, Mr. Speaker, is the neutral ground of all political philosophy; the neutral ground for which rival theories have been struggling in all ages. There are two ideas so utterly antagonistic that, when in any nation, either has gained absolute and complete possession of that neutral ground, the ruin of that nation has invariably followed. The one is that despotism which swallows and absorbs all power in a single-central government; the other is that extreme doctrine of local sovereignty which makes nationality impossible, and resolves a general government into anarchy and chaos. It makes but little difference, as to the final result, which of these ideas drives the other from the field; in either case ruin follows.
“The result exhibited by the one was seen in the Amphictyonic and Achæan leagues of ancient Greece, of which Madison, in the twentieth number of the Federalist, says:
“‘The inevitable result of all was imbecility in the government, discord among the provinces, foreign influences and indignities, a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities in war.’
“This is a fitting description of all nations which have carried the doctrine of local self-government so far as to exclude the doctrine of nationality. They were not nations, but mere leagues, bound together by common consent, ready to fall to pieces at the demand of any refractory member. The opposing idea was never better illustrated than when Louis XIV. entered the French Assembly, booted and spurred, and girded with the sword of ancestral kings, and said to the Deputies of France: ‘The State! I am the State!’
“Between these opposite and extreme theories of government, the people have been tossed from century to century; and it has been only when these ideas have been in reasonable equipoise, when this neutral ground has been held in joint occupancy, and usurped by neither, that popular liberty and national life have been possible. How many striking illustrations of this do we see in the history of France! The deposition of Louis XIV., followed by the Reign of Terror, when liberty had run mad and France was a vast scene of blood and ruin! We see it again in our day. Only a few years ago, the theory of personal government had placed in the hands of Napoleon III., absolute and irresponsible power. The communes of France were crushed, and local liberty existed no longer. Then followed Sedan and the rest. On the first day of last month, when France was trying to rebuild her ruined Government, when the Prussian cannon had scarcely ceased thundering against the walls of Paris, a deputy of France rose in the National Assembly and moved, as the first step toward the safety of his country, that a committee of thirty should be chosen, to be called the Committee of Decentralization. But it was too late to save France from the fearful reaction from despotism. The news comes to us, under the sea, that on Saturday last, the cry was ringing through France: ‘Death to the Priests!’ and ‘Death to the Rich!’ and the swords of the citizens of that new republic are now wet with each other’s blood.