This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
_Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new
evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is
cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance
comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows
with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to
elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish
themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of
circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character
remains the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the
primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must
have been as free as culture could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem
of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole
man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew.[105] The microscope cannot
find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.[106] Eyes,
ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of
reproduction that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in
the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true
doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to
throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil;
if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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