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The Civil Polity of the United States Considered in Its Theory and Practice
The Civil Polity of the United States Considered in Its Theory and Practice Author:Meeds Tuthill General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: M.CTuthill Subjects: United States Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Boo... more »ks.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. CIVIL POLITY IN GENERAL. 1. -- The Power To Design As General Ground. II. -- Relation Op State To Citizens, As Ground Of Reciprocal Development. III. -- The Religious Ground: -- Faith In Truth And In Persons. IV. -- Greek And Roman States -- Deficient Views Of Law And Lawmaker. It may be said that the intent of a civil polity is to promote harmony and prevent discord in the human family. But this implies that grounds exist for both the harmony and the discord. No theory of a polity would be rationalized, therefore, until these grounds were clearly discerned and put to use for the purpose. Before this clear perception of the means to be used, there would be no civil polity properly so called, no designed adaptation of means to ends. There would be a state of society, but not of civil polity. There would be a family state; for the human race, like every other genus of animals, is by Nature a family; but there would be no organized relation of men, such as we call a civil State, resting upon principles which, while they include the Natural relation, do so only by resting upon what is within and beyond or above it. I. It is easy to see that what harmonizes men is what they are willing to have in common, and that what occasions separation and discord is what they are not willing to have in common. But these vary with their situation as natural beings and their development as thinking beings. And only at an advanced stage of self-consciousness do lien clearly perceive that the former is idea, and the latter what they call " life, liber...« less