THE FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY.
IN the last two issues of the SIGNS we have considered the basic principles upon which this government was founded, the blessed freedom these principles produced, and the indications of departure therefrom. It was shown that the Scriptures had foretold all these things: the rise of the government, and the truly Christian principles which should give it life,—principles which if they had been followed would have perpetuated a free government forever. The divine prophecy also shows that the government founded on Christlike principles should speak as a dragon, in other words, become a persecutor. It should also make an image to the beast which preceded it. The beast preceding it was Papal Rome, combining in its complex, diverse nature the characteristics of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Grecia and Pagan Rome. It was the merging of an imperial despotism of an empire into the imperial despotism of a church. The two united, persecuted and put to death myriads of the saints of God. An image to that beast would be a union of Church and State in this nation, a repudiation of its fundamental principles of government as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and its Constitution. There must be a union of religion with the State in a political way before there can be legal persecution, or the speaking like a dragon. A church not connected with the State can not persecute. A State not connected with a church will not persecute. Neither will a true republic or democracy persecute. Counting all men as equals in respect to their natural rights, a true republic can never assume to legislate respecting man's religion or take the responsibility of directing it. All these things the founders of our government left to man and his God. Furthermore, a spirit of all-controlling greed is inimical to the life of a republic. Greed wants all. It is imperial in its nature. And where greed corners the markets, crushes out small manufacturers and tradesmen, combines and controls markets and men, it fosters imperialism and is death to a republic. Its spirit soon permeates Church and State, and individualism is lost in the mad race for money and power. So it went with Rome from the last days of the republic. So it is going in an ever-augmenting ratio in this land of America to-day. Here is a picture, taken from Froude's introduction to Cæsar, where is discussed the causes of the dissolution of the Roman Republic. With the exception of a few terms, it reads like a chapter of current events:— "To the student of political history, and to the English student above all others, the conversion of the Roman Republic into a military empire commands a peculiar interest. Notwithstanding many differences, the English and the Romans essentially resembled one another. The early Romans possessed the faculty of self-government beyond any people of whom we have historical knowledge, with the one exception of ourselves. In virtue of their temporal freedom, they became the most powerful nation in the known world; and their liberties perished only when Rome became the mistress of conquered races, to whom she was unable or unwilling to extend her privileges. "If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations can not govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties. . . . "Amidst the endless variety of circumstances there are constant phenomena which give notice of approaching danger; there are courses of action which have uniformly produced the same results; and the wise politicians are those who have learned from experience the real tendencies of things, until misled by superficial differences, who can shun the rocks where others have been wrecked, or, from foresight of what is coming, can be cool when the peril is upon them. "For these reasons the fall of the Roman Republic is exceptionally instructive to us. A constitutional government, the most enduring and the most powerful that ever existed, was put on its trial and found wanting. We see it in its growth; we see the causes which undermined its strength. We see attempts to check the growing mischief fail, and we see they failed. "With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Cæsar; the more distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect was trained to the highest point which it could reach; and on the great subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. "It was an age of material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of saloons and of dinner parties, of senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. "The highest offices of State were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for distinctions of wealth. "The struggles between plebians and patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed between the party of property and a party who desired a change in the structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the soil. "Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of things or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued. "Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing splendor; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. "The whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. "Tendencies now in operation may a few generations hence land modern society in similar conclusions unless other convictions revive meanwhile and get the mastery of them, of which possibility no more need be said than this: that unless there be such revival in some shape or other the forces, whatever they be, which control the forms in which human things adjust themselves will make an end again, as they made an end before, of what are called free institutions. "To make money—money by any means, lawful or unlawful—became the universal passion. Money! The cry was still money! Money was the one thought from the highest senator to the poorest wretch who sold his vote in the Comitia. "For money, judges gave unjust decrees and juries gave corrupt verdicts. Governors held their provinces for one, two or three years. They went out bankrupt from extravagance; they returned with millions for fresh riot. "The opportunities, opened for men to advance their fortunes in other parts of the world, drained Italy of many of the most enterprising citizens. The grandsons of the yeomen who had held at bay Pyrrhus and Hannibal sold their farms and went away. The small holdings merged rapidly into large estates bought up by the Roman capitalists. . . . Everywhere the small farmers were disappearing, and the soil of Italy was fast passing into the hands of a few territorial magnates. "The multitude was kept quiet by the morsels of meat which were flung to it when it threatened to be troublesome. The seven thousand in Israel, the few, who in all States and in all times remained pure in the midst of evil, looked on with disgust, fearing that any remedy which they might try might be worse than the disease. . . . "The nobles and great commoners of Rome rapidly found themselves in possession of revenues which their fathers could not have imagined in their dreams, and money in the stage of progress at which Rome had arrived was convertible into power. To obtain a province was the first ambition of a Roman noble. The road to it lay through the prætorship and the consulship; these offices, therefore, became the prizes of the State; and, being in the gift of the people, they were sought after by means which demoralized alike the givers and the receivers. The elections were managed by clubs and coteries; and, except on occasions of national danger or political excitement, those who spent most freely were most certain of success. Under these conditions the chief powers in the commonwealth necessarily centered in the rich. There was no longer an aristocracy of birth, still less of virtue. . . . The door of promotion was open to all who had the golden key. The great commoners bought their way into the magistracies. From the magistracies they passed into the Senate; and the Roman senator, tho in Rome itself and in free debate among his colleagues he was handled as an ordinary man, when he traveled had the honors of a sovereign. "The proud privilege of Roman citizenship was still jealously reserved to Rome itself and a few favored towns and colonies; and a mere subject could maintain no rights against a member of the haughty oligarchy, which controlled the civilized world." How it reads like a chapter in American political life, doesn't it? He who is familiar with Roman history sees it repeated in America to-day. Said America's greatest historian, John Clark Ridpath, in September, 1898:—7 "A revolution is at the door. It impends like a cloud on the horizon. Whether we shall accept it and its results remains to be determined; but that a great transformation of political society is in the dawn let no man longer doubt. What a few thinkers have been able to foresee and foretell, and what they have been ridiculed for foreseeing and foretelling, has risen like an exhalation of the night. The swift whirl of events, becoming even swifter, has brought the apprehended change upon us, and ere the century closes we are obliged, looking around upon what is virtually the wreck of our old-time institutions, to see arising over them the spectre of Imperialism. "The proposition to transform the American Republic into an empire is not only put forth, but it has the support of all the special interests in the United States. . . . They do not openly propose, any more than the leaders at Rome proposed at the middle of the first century B.C., to cast aside the name of the republic and adopt the name of the empire; but they proceed insidiously to use the old terminology and to discard the facts. The democracy of the New World is to be deceived with the retention of the name of the Republic while the Republic is robbed of its character and substance. "As evidences of this is set forth "insular ambition—a craving for the acquisition of territories in the ocean;" "political ambition;" "an increase of political power;" and "the rule of money over manhood." He might have added an indication of an element far more potent, the constant effort and combination of religious bodies to suppress religious freedom, having Sunday laws for its center, and which can never be made effectively operative save under an imperialism. We were told in the beginning of the Spanish-American War, in December, 1897, by the chief magistrate of this government, that "forcible annexation can not be thought of; that, by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression." And he was right. But what was true as to Cuba was just as true as to Porto Rico and the Philippines. But both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have been repudiated or ignored in the government of the United States for many months, at first as of necessity, but latterly openly. A people who for hundreds of years waged war against the despotism of Spain's imperialism, and especially the religious despotism which Spain fostered; a people who, looking across the broad Pacific and seeing the great free Republic of the West basking in security, having religion without a pope, a government without a king, founded the first Asiatic republic, were purchased with their land, and forced again under the religious yoke from which they sought to free themselves. Upon Porto Rico was levied taxes without her consent. She was subject to the United States, but not under the protection of its Constitution. Says a noted publicist, a former United States minister to Spain, an ex-major-general in the army and United States senator, a member of President Hayes' Cabinet:— "Can you be blind to the effects which the tendencies of imperialism are already exercising among ourselves upon the popular mind? Do you not hear the scoffing levity with which the Declaration of Independence and the high ideals of liberty and human rights which have so long been sacred to our people are made sport of; how the teachings of Washington and Lincoln are derided as antiquated nursery rhymes, and how the Constitution, when it stands in the way of grasping schemes, is lightly brushed aside? . . . Nothing can be more dangerous in a democracy like ours than the prevalence of the notion that might is right—a notion involving the worst kind of anarchy, above and below. And that principle is preached and proclaimed every day by this imperialistic policy." We are not attacking the politics of the matter. With that we have nothing to do. We are simply showing that this great Republic, in harmony with the prophecy of Inspiration, is repudiating the very basic principles of its existence, and is becoming an imperialism. Israel of old wished to become like the nations around her. She did so to her own undoing. America in her splendid providential isolation has been the wonder of the world, the cynosure of liberty to the oppressed, a means in God's providence in influencing the nations of earth to higher, better thought and broader liberties. She has been admired and loved. But now, in her desire to become like the nations, she has broken her bonds of peace, has descended from her elevation of strength, and has launched herself upon the great, troublous sea of international strife. And this is to the undoing of the Republic. The Republic still exists in name; the Empire is here. More than this, the language of imperialism is becoming common. We read in the papers of the "court" at Washington. The authorities in the Philippines are sending out to school superintendents in this country circulars, which begin as follows:— "United States Military Government in the Philippines, Department Public Instruction.—A Department of Public Instruction for the Philippines has just been established, and I write to ask if you can aid us in the civilization of this new part of our EMPIRE by sending such reports, bulletins, school laws, etc., now or to be issued, as you may have for distribution?" Back of all this in Satan's plan lies the religious question. The United States Supreme Court affirmed in 1892 that "this is a Christian nation." The next year both the legislative and executive branches of this government committed itself to the principle of religious legislation, the union of religion with the State. The Sunday-law workers of the country, the National Reform organizations, are endeavoring to enforce religious dogmas by law upon the conscience of free men. But Sunday laws are practically inoperative, and always will be in a true republic. But let imperialism rule, let the equal rights of men be ignored, as they are coming to be more and more, and the dragon voice of imperialism will be heard, and God's children will be persecuted for conscience' sake. The image to the beast will enforce the laws of men that have made void God's law, and enforce the mark of the beast and his image upon all. This is the meaning of the prophecy and history. As surely as we have seen the first, we shall see the second. God faithfully warns all, and points us to the same Refuge—Jesus Christ, His righteousness, and everlasting kingdom.