will be done by the opposite party. He has no right to decline the defence of a person, which means the finding out for him all that fairly can be said in his favor, except indeed in very peculiar cases. Declining the defence beforehand would amount to a prejudging of the case, and in the division of judicial labor every one ought to be defended. The defence of possible innocence, not the defeat of justice, is the aim of counsel.

Great advocates, such as Romilly,2 have very distinctly pronounced themselves against that view which still seems the prevailing one among the lawyers; and Dr. Thomas Arnold was so deeply impressed with the moral danger to which the profession of the law, at present, exposes its votary, that he used to persuade his pupils not to become lawyers, while

1 At the very moment that these pages are passing through the press, (in 1853,) a case has occurred in an English court, of a young man indicted for burglariously entering the room of some young woman. His counsel in the defence suggested that probably the young lady had given an appointment to the prisoner. "That is not in the brief," cried the prisoner himself, and the court justly reprimanded the barrister. It ought to be added that in this case the barrister wrote a letter of submission to the court. This has not been done in other cases quite as bad in principle. Thus, another publicly reproved barrister insisted that he had done what the profession required, when he had resorted to the following trick. He had subpoenaed the chief witness against his client, so that he could not appear, and then argued that the prosecutor must know his client to be innocent, else he would certainly have produced his witness, etc.

Since this was written, the following case has occurred (in Cincinnati, 1853.) When the defence came on, 300 witnesses were sworn. The prosecution of course did not believe that its turn would come for a long time. But the defence only examined some four witnesses, and then declared it had done. The prosecution was not prepared to proceed, and asked for delay, but the court decided that the case could not be stopped. Thus the whole trial was upset, and a verdict of not guilty was found. Now, are such atrocities to be borne with? Does freedom consist in giving all possible protection to trickery?

2 There is a very excellent passage on this topic in the reflections of Sir Samuel Romilly, on himself and the good he might do, should he be appointed lord chancellor, page 384 and sequ. of vol. iii. of his Memoirs; 2d ed. London, 1840.

Mr. Bentham openly declared that no person could escape, and that even Romilly had not remained wholly untainted.

It ought to be observed, however, that a more correct opinion on the obligations of the advocate seems to be fast gaining ground in England. At present it seems to be restricted to the public, but the time will come when this opinion will reach the profession itself. Like almost all reforms, it comes from without, and will ultimately force an entrance into the courts and the inns. We are thus earnest in our desire of seeing correct views on this subject prevail, because we have so high an opinion of the importance of the advocate in a modern free polity.1

This was written in 1853.

CHAPTER XXI.

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

THE last constituent of our liberty that I shall mention is local and institutional self-government. Many of the guaran

1 The history of this proud word is this: It was doubtless made in imitation of the Greek autonomy, and seems originally to have been used in a moral sense only. It is of frequent occurrence in the works of the divines who flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After that period it appears to have been dropped for a time. We find it in none of the English dictionaries, although a long list of words is given compounded with self, and among them many which are now wholly out of use; for instance, Shakspeare's Self-sovereignty. In Dr. Worcester's Universal and Crit. Dictionary, the word is marked with a star, which denotes that he has added it to Dr. Johnson's, and the authority given is Paley, who, to my certain knowledge, does not use it in his Political Philosophy, nor have several of my friends succeeded in finding it in any other part of his works, although diligent search has been made.

Whether the term was first used for political self-government in England or America I have not been able to ascertain. Richard Price, D.D., used it in a political sense in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, etc., 3d edition, London, 1776, although it does not clearly appear whether he means what we now designate by independence, or internal (domestic) self-government. Jefferson said, in 1798, that "the residuary rights are reserved to their (the American states) own selfgovernment." The term is now freely used both in England and America. In the former country we find a book on Local Self-government; in ours, Daniel Webster said, on May the 22d, 1852, in his Faneuil Hall speech: "But I say to you and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration-the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all-that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be."

Earl Derby, when premier, said, in the house of lords, that the officers

tees of individual liberty which have been mentioned receive their true import in a pervading system of self-government, and on the other hand are its refreshing springs. Individual liberty consists, in a great measure, in politically acknowledged self-reliance, and self-government is the sanction of self-reliance and self-determination in the various minor and larger circles in which government acts and of which it consists. sent from abroad to assist in the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, would "bear witness back to their own country how safely and to what extent a people might be relied upon in whom the strongest hold of their government was their own reverence and respect for the free institutions of their country, and the principles of popular self-government controlled and modified by constitutional monarchy."

In one word, self-government is now largely used on both sides of the Atlantic, in a political sense.

This modern use of the word is no innovation, as it was no innovation when St. Paul used the old Greek word riots in the vastly expanded sense of christian faith. Ideas must be designated. The innovation was christianity itself, not the use of the word to designate an idea greater than Pistis could have signified before.

That self-government in politics is always applied by the Englishspeaking race for the self-government of the people or of an institution, in other words, that self has in this sense a reflective meaning, is as natural as the fact itself that the word has come, in course of time, to be applied to political government, simply because we must express the idea of a people or a part of a people who govern themselves and are not governed by some one else.

Self-government belongs to the Anglican race, and the English word. is used even by foreigners. A German and a French statesman, both distinguished in literature and politics, used not long ago the English word in conversations in their own languages with me.

Donaldson's Greek Dictionary renders autovouta with self-government. The word self, or its corresponding term in other languages, may have a reflective sense, as in self-murder, or it may have a merely emphatic or exclusive meaning, ipse, he himself. Hence the fact that the Emperor of Russia calls himself autocrat of all the Russias, (self-ruler, himself and alone the ruler,) and we use the corresponding word self-government for the opposite, the government in which the ruling is left to the ruled. The old English self-sovereign is the exact rendering of autocrat. The Germans use the word Selbst-Verlag, i.e. sale of the book by the author himself. German wine-shops in New York have frequently on their signs in English, the ludicrous words, Self-Imported Wines.

Without local self-government, in other words, self-government consistently carried out and applied to the realities of life, and not remaining a mere general theory, there is no real selfgovernment according to Anglican views and feelings. Selfgovernment is founded on the willingness of the people to take care of their own affairs, and the absence of that disposition which looks to the general government for everything; as well as on the willingness in each to let others take care of their own affairs. It cannot exist where the general principle of interference prevails, that is, the general disposition in the executive and administration, to do all it possibly can do, and to substitute its action for individual or minor activity and for self-reliance. Self-government is the corollary of liberty.

So far we have chiefly spoken of that part of liberty which consists in checks, except indeed when we treated of representative legislatures; self-government may be said to be liberty in action. It requires a pervading conviction throughout the whole community that government, and especially the executive and administrative branch, should do nothing but what it necessarily must do, and which cannot, or ought not, or will not be done by self-action; and that, moreover, it should allow matters to grow and develop themselves. Self-government implies self-institution, not only at the first setting out of government, but as a permanent principle of political life. In a pervading self-government, the formative action of the citizens is the rule; the general action of the government is the exception, and only an aid. The common action of government in this system is not originative, but regulative and moderative, or conciliative and adjusting. Self-government, therefore, transacts by far the greater bulk of all public business through citizens, who, even while clad with authority, remain essentially and strictly citizens, and parts of the people. It does not create nor tolerate a vast hierarchy of officers, forming a class of mandarins for themselves, and acting as though they formed and were the state, and the people only the substratum on which the state is founded, similar to the former view that the church consists of the hierarchy of