does nature impress on individuals, irrespective of their age, as individuals, this diversity of the leading and determining forces of mind. There are men who as individuals are born boys, and who remain boys in mind and character through life. Others have as individuals youthful natures, others are endowed with the spirit and character of the tried man, while still others are as individuals old from childhood. Thus, Pericles was of a youthful nature, Cæsar naturally a man, Alcibiades a boy, and Augustus by nature an old man. Most men in their individual nature are not complete and well balanced, but mixed and defective. Many, for instance, are boyish or old at heart, but manly in spirit; or old in mind, but young at heart. As regards politics, mind is the decisive element. The mass of men do not individually belong to the higher stages. There are but few really liberal or truly conservative individuals. The bulk of men are by nature born old or boyish." (§ 35.) "That is, only in few men, considered as individuals, is the reason that discerns and regulates, or the creative power of speech, the prevailing power of the mind; most men have certainly a sensitive or receptive mind, are eager to learn, have rather a passive than an active mind, with the mental constitution of boys or older people. Parties, accordingly, are not to be compared with the age stages themselves. The differences of their inclinations and faculties are rather traceable to the natural difference of individual disposition, in which the difference of the age stages is permanently stamped and expressed. And because parties thus have their foundation in human nature, they also all have a natural right. Some correspond to the higher, and others to the lower, development of life; and from this correspondence their natural order and sub-order result. Their explanation is their judgment. Only the manly parties, the liberals and conservatives, are called to the government of the state, but not the two extreme parties, the radicals and absolutists. Their doctrine combats the illusion that radicalism should be considered as the only resolute and logical form of liberalism, as also the supposition that conservatism, in its highest power, becomes absolutism. Their doctrine insists, rather, on the distinction between the two parties in the ascending line of development, vide the party of progress by an artificial and skillfully contrived confusion of ideas, to humble the radicals, and to support the power of the Swiss liberal conservatives. This suspicion was wholly unfounded; his doctrine is, on the whole, rather a necessary consequence of Rohmer's psychological views, and it is decidedly favorable to the formation of liberal states. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the circumstances under which the doctrine originated might have suggested a suspicion of this kind, and that at the first formulation of the doctrine the passionate party struggles in which the author was involved, in certain particular points, may have exerted an unfavorable influence in some places. A no smaller hindrance than this wrong suspicion lay in the as yet undeveloped condition of political party life in Germany, people being still unaccustomed there to look at the political spirit from a psychological point of view. If the book had been written in 1849 instead of in 1844, it would have been more easily intelligible to the bulk of the German nation. — The fundamental idea of the doctrine is this: "As the state must be understood in the light of human nature and receive its explanation from the facts of human nature, so also must political parties in their natural causes be explained by the facts of human life. To understand the state as a political body, I must first understand the elements of the human mind: to understand the life of the state, I must investigate the laws of its development." (§ 17.) "This development manifests itself in the age stages of the life of man. The development of the state itself constitutes its history; but parties are the independent groupings of the different age stages of human life, by themselves and side by side with each other." (§ 217.) "As we distinguish four stages in the life of man-the boy, the young man (adolescens), the tried man (juvenis), and the old man (senex)—so may we distinguish four fundamental types of party. At the height of virile life stand the young man and the tried man. In these the active powers of mind hold the supremacy; in the former the generative and creative forces of character tand mind, and in he latter the preserving and purifying forces. Liberal principles accord with the mind of the young man, and conservative principles commend themselves to the mind of the tried man. In boy-boyish radicalism, and youthful, manly liberalism, hood and in old age, on the contrary, the passive forces of mind are found in the foreground, in the boy in an ascending, but in the old man in a descending, direction. The boy has a vivid intuitive power and imagination, and a sensitive heart, but creative energy is still undeveloped in him. The old man has, in common with woman, susceptibility and impressionableness of nature, dexterity in action, certainty and coolness in calculation, rapidity and clearness of comprehension. The boy is a radical; the old man, absolute. — As in the organic course of nature every man passes through the different age stages, and experiences this change of strength and of impulse, so also and between the two parties, in the descending line of development, conservatism and absolutism; and it demands the subordination of radicals to liberals, of absolutists to conservatives. Only when liberals and conservatives are at the helm does mind prevail over matter, and force of character over excitability. The struggles of parties are the following: of liberalism against conservatism, e. g., plebeians and patricians in the palmy days of Rome; of radicalism against liberalism, e. g., the English radicals against the whigs; of absolutism against conservatism, e. g., Carlists and moderantists in Spain, high tories and moderates in England; of conservatism against radi calism, e. g., the European struggle of the tories under Pitt against the French revolution; of liberalism against absolutism, e. g., Luther against the popes of his time, and O'Connell against orangemen; of radicalism against absolutism, e. g., the struggle of the French revolution against the monarchies of the last century." (§ 16.)- The alliances of parties are also manifold. The most dangerous to the healthy life of the state is the alliance of both the extreme parties, of radicals and absolutists. The alliance of liberals and conservatives is the most favorable to its normal development. If the development of the state requires new institutions, the liberals naturally step to the front, and the alliance will be a conservative liberal one; if there be question of preserving the threatened order of things, the conservative element must needs preponderate, and the alliance assumes a liberal conservative character. When Rohmer's doctrine of parties first originated at Zürich in 1842, the preservation of the existing order of things seems to have been the task on hand; a liberal conservative policy was proclaimed, and the attempt was made to found a liberal conservative party. Ideas were at that time expressed with great distinctness and clearness, and these ideas had an influence that can not be denied. But the first attempt at the formation of a party was made under very unfavorable conditions, and attained only an incomplete development. The liberal elements chanced to be too weakly represented, and the young party was unable to keep pace with the stronger movement of the epoch, in which liberal and radical elements had become indissolubly mingled together. Its principle, however, was able to tide over the revolution, and thus passed to a part of its former adversaries, but the party itself, which first had recognized that principle, was dissolved. While Germany at first took but little notice of it, English and French statesmen, on the contrary, took up the principle, yet without altogether understanding the full depth of its significance; they were, moreover, affected by the same false tendency from which the Swiss liberal conservative party had suffered. Guizot attempted to found in France a liberal conservative party, but he ignored the liberal aspirations of the times, and insisted in a doctrinarian manner on preserving the untenable. In England, however, Sir Robert Peel was more fortunate in organizing a liberal conservative policy. Since that time, however, this idea has entered into the party movements of almost all continental states, and without it modern party contentions can nowhere be rightly understood. If the differences of political parties depend on the difference of natural individual disposition, the necessity of parties, and, further still, their legitimateness, follows as a consequence; for anything that has the roots of its existence in nature, has a right to have its existence respected. All laws and public measures, accordingly, that aim at the control of parties, or at the suppression of particular, even of extreme, parties, violate the natural law of creation, which has produced this multiplicity, and which, even through the conflict of differences, creates the highest phenomena of human life. The choice of a definite party, accordingly, is only in a secondary sense the work of personal insight, and of free will; for every individual in the first place feels the impulse and attraction of nature. The man who is by nature a radical will feel himself drawn toward the radical party. The man who is naturally old will be drawn rather toward the party of absolutists. But, as in all human things, the force of natural instinct is not endowed with an absolutely compulsory power, man possesses a power of mind and character over himself; he is able to overcome his own impulses, when he believes them to be foolish or injurious. Other motives and interests modify the differences which distinguish the natural individual disposition, and sometimes impel those who are naturally radical to submit to the direction of the conservatives, or drive them into the camp of the absolutists. Education, with the power of ideas and habits which it gives, has frequently the most decided influence on the choice of a party. Experience and study may also induce an individual to profess different principles and tendencies, and hence to adhere to a party different from that which we should have expected, from his individual nature, he would ally himself to. - Nature herself has taken care that the dangerous one-sidedness of parties should not completely isolate men from one another, by compelling every individual man in his lifetime to pass through all the different age stages, and thus to experience in himself and in his own near kindred and acquaintances the nature of other parties than the party to which he belongs by his own individual nature. Any attentive and thinking man will hence judge more broadly and fairly of others when he has an eye to the many-sided teachings of nature. Nature has a healing remedy for the arrogance of extreme parties, and gives a warning to individuals to join rather the more manly central parties; and it directs all parties always to submit to the whole by manifesting, as in the organization of the human body, complete human nature, and all the faculties of the soul in the proper relation of order and subordination. It hardly needs to be recalled to mind, that the following characteristics of the four parties are merely typical. Real life scarcely ever expresses altogether completely and purely the typical, fundamental idea, but only approaches it more or less closely. But when science in grand outlines sketches the natural types, it in so doing elucidates and arranges the otherwise unfathomable, chaotic variety of phenomena. —1. Radicalism. Radicalism is illustrated and explained by the nature of the boy. Although the delineation is made with great skill, and is true in the main, the picture is not free from a certain exaggeration, or from polemical bitterness, which can be explained only by the time in which it was drawn. Hence its dark sides have manifestly been painted with greater relish and more nervous strokes than its bright sides. The author, Theodore Rohmer, in his later years himself admitted this. — He introduces his description by a reference to "the spirit of contradiction, which begins to stir within every man, after the development of consciousness. This spirit, this opposition for the sake of opposition, in faith, science, church and state, is the main trait of radicalism." (§ 45.) "Radicalism is very well adapted to oppose when, from the sphere of an inferior criticism, it pursues the sins of absolutism, when it hastens the march of conservatism, and clears the road for liberalism; ever blaming, hurrying, agitating, but incapable of ruling; productive of misfortune and of terrible disturbances as soon as it seizes the reins of government. Hence, it is a frequent occurrence in parliamentary states, that the most brilliant leaders of the opposition betray a complete incapacity when they are called into power. Government and childhood exclude each other." (§§ 50-52.) The mobility of the boy is unbounded. Quiet, rest and self-containment are impossible to him. He loves change and variety to a passionate degree, and his ardent nature is continually in search of novelty. To this must be added his unhealthy longing to become a grown man. He sees the adult people around him, and his most powerful wish is to be like them. He imitates them, and plays the man. 'Novelty and progress' are the watch-words of radicalism. But novelty' is not reform; it proceeds from the impulse to change, and, like the latter, it is variable in itself; and 'progress' is only the impulse toward progress. He wants to reap before he has well sown; he is given to excess, as was the French revolution, or he is compelled to give himself up, as Joseph II. had to give himself up. Radicalism borrows from liberalism, and imitates it. Radicalism everywhere in Europe, through organic self-deception, regards itself as liberalism.” (§ 46.)—"If the boy were not altogether by nature incapable of ruling, and relegated to obedience, he certainly would be thus incapable and relegated to a very high degree by his complete lack of experience. Experience can not be learned, but must be acquired in the school | of life. The inability to learn from experience accompanies boyish natures through life. It was precisely this inability which so deeply embittered Napoleon against the radical ideologists, and for very good reason. So destitute of meaning and experience is radicalism. When Cola Rienzi believed that he could resuscitate the power of Rome by means of the mere name of the tribunate, and the forms of ancient Rome; or when the German Burschenschaft thought to restore the spirit of the empire by restoring the title of German empire, they dreamt like inexperienced boys. If Joseph II. in Austria, Pombal in Portugal, and Struensee in Denmark, had taken counsel of experience, they would have understood that it is impossible by any number of decrees to suddenly extirpate the deeply rooted past.' (S$ 53, 54.) "As the boy is complete neither in his mind, which is in process of development, nor in his sensitive faculties, which can be ripened only through life, it follows that he must learn. To learn is not to know, but only a preparation for knowledge. But the boy, although desirous of learning, at every step which he takes in learning from others, believes himself to be in possession of real knowledge. On the other hand, we all know how difficult it is to overcome the aversion of a boy for methodical learning. His wild disposition carries him away from it, while his instinct demands culture and schooling; between the two he remains in a wavering state. In this manner radicalism has ever displayed either barbaric ignorance or an exaggerated craving for formal culture, schooling and enlightenment. Rousseau, the father of modern radicalism, instead of culture wished to see men in the rude state of nature; our modern radicals, radical in their demand for culture, cry loudly for education and popular culture as only boys cry for schooling." (§§ 56, 57.) — “ The powers of the boy are naturally adapted to mental appropriation. His susceptibility is marvelous, his imagination indefatigable; but reason, will-power and all deeper insight are absent. The boy, in a word, is brimful of talent, not of mind. Talent is the characteristic mark of radicals; but talent has no standing in any court for depth of intellect. History affords us a very powerful example of this truth. In the three parliaments of the French revolution, in the constituent assembly, in the legislative assembly and convention, there was a galaxy of men of talent, partly of the most remarkable kind, and of such variety and number combined as the world had but seldom witnessed. The names, which at that time followed one another in rapid succession on the scene, still remain the pride of the French nation. And what became of all these men of talent, when a great spirit, when Napoleon, put in his appearance? It seemed as if the one great mind alone sufficed to fill the vast field which a hundred men of talent had divided among themselves. How even the most renowned among them shrank into insignificance before Napoleon: men like Sieyes, Talleyrand, Cambaceres, and even Carnot! Yet Mirabeau maintained himself; in the midst of all these radical men of talent he was the only intellect." (§§ 59, 60.)—“The boy, like the poet, lives in a world of ideals; he knows the real world only in miniature, and even in miniature he has no thorough knowledge of it. It is perfectly natural that he should build himself a world of poetical and fantastic day-dreams, of castles in the air. Radicalism has also created a world of ideals; it, too, is clothed with a charm which has misled whole nations. A world, full of freedom, happiness and bliss; a world, in which all men embrace one another, and live together like brothers, in which everlasting peace reigns, and in which an everlasting community of all spiritual and corporeal possessions obtains: a world of this kind, such as was proclaimed by the religious visionaries of the middle ages, and by the political dream ers of the nineteenth century-how charming it al- whole. How radicalism everywhere, both in the ways appears to the senses and to the heart, in material and the intellectual spheres, is urged by the spite of the fact that experience and reason have impulse toward 'leveling,' needs no further exso often told us that it crumbles away in the pres- amples. The boy moves with originality on the ence of reality. The attempts of radical world- field of speculation. Man, in childhood, indulges improvers belong as little to real politics as poetry in a number of questions, which he is unable to itself belongs to politics; but for life they possess answer as a man. He thinks about the origin of a truth similar to that of poetry. In fact, what the world, about the reasons of being. But he happiness the boy dreams of as in store for him does not investigate for the sake of a higher purin his manhood; of the freedom that he will one pose, but merely because investigation is a pleasure day enjoy, and the pleasure of a thousand circum- to him. Abstraction, as abstraction merely, satisstances in life! If he reaches manhood, and if fies him. The two characteristic marks of all fate favors him, he certainly may find happiness radical speculation are: an ideally mingling the and freedom, yet it will be a kind different from reason of the world's existence with the world what he had dreamed of; he will then smile at itself (pantheism); practically, the supremacy of the dreams of his boyhood, and instead of these abstraction over life." (§ 74.)—“Radicalism, he will try to enjoy the sober reality of the pres- like childhood, is good and rich in blessings, ent." (§§ 63, 64.)—"The boy's understanding and when in its right place its effects are unleads him to the formal branches of knowledge. equaled; but it degenerates and becomes worthEven his imagination, when he applies it to sci- less when it swerves from the right path, and entific questions, guides him into the field of ab- when placed at the helm becomes a prey to destraction. All radicalism is at all times formal, moniacal powers. From what evils it frees us, mathematical and abstract, when it invades the from what abuses, from what an oppressive load domain of manhood. Its culture and legislation are it unburdens Europe, by its ever-living, stimulatfull of formalism; its conception of life and history ing power and active foresight; how much of evil are abstract; the radical state is mechanical with it does away with, how much of what is useless out a suspicion even of organism; it is constructed, it removes, and how much of what is new it has as Aristotle expresses it, xar' àpidμòv, instead encouraged all this is well known in recent of nar' àžiav, for it adds, subtracts, compounds times. If it had been able to keep within the and distributes men and affairs as if they were bounds of the opposition, if it had surrendered only arithmetical quantities." (§§ 65, 66.) the direction of affairs to liberalism, instead of 'Culture and education, as means substitutive of thwarting it, its effects would surely have been a nature, are the one great idea which has become blessing. The country may be considered fortuwith modern radicals the most predominant idio- nate in which radicalism keeps up an opposition syncrasy. That idea proceeds from the boy's ca- without encroaching in public affairs, but keeps pacity for education. The boy sees in education its energetic action within the bounds of modesty. a substitute for innate gifts, and even considers it Woe to the country in which it rules supreme. the creator of individual nature. He believes that Waste of mind and emptiness of heart, the ruin education can make fools clever, and the stupid of the past and the decay in the present, are the intelligent; that it is in the power of education to signs that accompany it." (§ 77.) — “The boy make all men equally learned, equally intelligent; believes that he shows courage when he displays that through the same means of education all only impudence, and energy when he makes a classes can be raised to the same height, and that manifestation of obstinacy. He indeed possesses the crowd can be extirpated forever. Of all rad- courage to do many things which the grown man ical ideas, none has been more widely spread in can not attain to, because to such courage belongs Germany than this, and partly for the reason that a barbaric recklessness toward all existing rights, the Germans, of all nations, are endowed with relations and institutions, or an unparalleled degree great capacity for comprehensive and genuine of levity. Yet these are precisely the qualities by culture, and because they love education even too which radicalism has been able to impart an occamuch not to easily over-estimate it. Instead of sional bold forward movement to the wheels of adapting culture to different natures, character is history, which in certain cases it would have been indiscriminately made to adapt itself to one and beyond the power of even the most advanced libthe same form of education. Happy age, when eralism to impart. They are also the qualities of all Germans shall be educated and geistreich. which Providence frequently avails itself for the Stupidity, which hitherto, at times, has been attainment of its designs. Radicalism not only modestly silent, would then reign supreme, while vents itself against old institutions, when they have mediocrity has already begun to rule in con- become rotten; it attacks the past and pulls down sequence of that very idiosyncrasy." (§ 71.)- everything with relish; the radicalism of the better 'As in the case of women, the boy only knows kind does this, because it carries within it the one reason for everything. The understanding, organic delusion that it can create a new world which is not as yet developed in the boy, super- from the wreck of the old, and the worse kind of ordinates and subordinates intuition, which he radicalism, because it is impelled thereto by its possesses, and conceives objects, notwithstand- love of destruction. A tabula rasa is what both ing their variety, as a complete and undivided I want." ($ 85.)-"Although far from cruel, the create and organize, just as the boy is fitted for revolution." (§ 95.)-"Because it alone unites activity with genuine strength, liberalism is the formative principle of all existence, in science and in faith, in the church and in the state; and only that which contains within itself creative germs with a positive core, deserves the name of liberal. Everywhere, under all conditions, and even where it carries destruction before it, liberalism acts as an organizing power, and where it does not directly distribute blessing it is infusive of new life. In German history we have a refreshing picture of an organizing liberal in King Henry I." (§ 96.) "The opinions of the young man are full of ardor, his assertions are full of acuteness, but he is naturally too modest and too humane not to honor all outside aspirations if nobly harbored. Where the boy is exclusive in his opinions the young man investigates, and where the former is narrow-minded the latter preserves his intellectual sight free and undimmed. He is free from prejudice, and takes things as they are; and this freedom is the mother of the highest kind of toleration, a toleration, however, which never ignobly vacillates between what is good and what is evil, or which meanly wavers between opposite tendencies, but honors what is worthy of honor, even in its bitterest enemy, and from its own steady point of view judges, with impartiality, the points of view of others." (§ 97.)—“As independence is the nerve of manhood, it follows that the man can never find the reasons of his actions in authority; he can find them only in the truth which authority can lay before him. A liberal government will never pay homage to public opinion as such, nor to the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist as such; yet it will always respect the spirit of the age, combat its falsities, and take its truths to heart. A liberal opposition will never despise the authority of the throne, nor accept any proposal merely because it comes from the throne, nor, like the radicals, reject it only because it emanates from the throne." ($109.)-"The age period of the young man is the highest expression of man. The mightiest ideas and passions, the highest power of his intellect, the richest fullness of his sensitive faculties, and his most perfect bodily development, belong to this age. In this age stage man becomes man complete. In this sense liberalism is humane, it and humanity become one. The greatest and only perfect liberal known to history is Christ. And through what did Christ exert his most powerful influence, and so powerfully that no one among us who knows anything of his individu boy commits many cruel acts. His anger when irritated, his revengefulness when offended, his fury when controlled, are simply barbaric. But he nevertheless combines all this with a tenderness, or rather a weakness, of feeling, which easily passes into pusillanimity and exaggeration. The source of these opposite qualities is sentimentality, which is as cruel as it is easily aroused, as easily inclined to evil as it is capable of good. This sentimentality consists in an excessive degree of sensitiveness." (§ 87.)—“By nature the boy has | only an abstract sensual conception of the world. He is able to conceive only unity or multiplicity; and these opposites coexist in him as unreconciled with one another as were Judaism and Greek polytheism in the ancient world." (§ 88.)- "Abstraction makes things equal. Thus, the boy looks upon men as equal except in as far as they do not exist outside his own sphere. Boys among themselves are democrats. Their whole mind and heart demand equality. Take a school of thirty or forty boys the moment before the teacher enters. An absolute freedom and equality prevail among them. The instant the teacher appears, all are just as equal in obedience as they were before in anarchy. Boys are fit only for a democratic or a despotic government. To the boy freedom means only following his caprice, and doing what he pleases. His idea of equality is, that nobody should be allowed to enjoy higher privileges than himself. What has been said describes, as we believe, sufficiently the main traits of radicalism, considered as the submission of the organic life of man to the unlimited power of abstraction." (§ 92.)-2. Liberalism. Liberalism is the representation of the young man. "The youth enters into the world free. He is no longer hampered by discipline; life and fate henceforth educate him. His first act is to examine the ground on which he stands, the inner and the outer world. His criticism spares nothing; he is bold enough to doubt everything; yet not merely for the sake of doubting. He doubts, in order by his own power to attain to truth. He seeks, in order to find. Intellectual and moral criticism is a main trait of all liberalism. But there is no trace in liberalism of the opposition which is made by the man who is not free. If I were to draw an historical picture of the character of liberalism, and point out wherein it differs from radicalism, I should recall the life of Luther in the religious sphere, and Lessing's labors in the scientific world." (§§ 93, 94.)—"The young man is man in his highest bloom. Replete with life and movement, and at the same time full of sense and conscious-ality can well help loving and revering him? Why ness; his mind developed in every direction, at the height of creative power, high-minded and energetic, still undisturbed about fate; the entire man in the fullness of all his impulses, ardently desirous of the future, and yet even now master of the present, unhindered by obstacles, inventive of plans, full of sense in the choice of means, and of genius in execution; a constitution of this kind, or none, is adapted to reform, or rather, born to has his image been stamped so deeply on the heart of humanity? Not because of the sublimity of his mind, or simply because of the miracles of his life alone; not because of the supernatural in his nature, but because of his humanity.” (§ 100)—“ If it be true that liberalism expresses human nature in that which is most peculiar to it, then of the four parties referred to above, supremacy belongs to it; for only man should rule over men. But as |