be regarded as his own supreme sovereign. Free, because land is free,
when he joins a community he will enter into social relations with its
citizens by contract. He will legislate (form contracts) with the rest
of his immediate community in person. Every community, in all that
relates peculiarly to itself, will be self-governing. Where one
community shall have natural political bonds with another, or in any
respect form with several others a greater community, the
circumscription affected will legislate through central committees and a
direct vote of the citizenship. Executives and other officials will be
but stewards. In a society so constituted, communities that reject the
elements of political success will languish; free men will leave them.
The communities that accept the elements of success, becoming examples
through their prosperity, will be imitated; and thus the momentum of
progress will be increased. Communities free, state boundaries as now
known will be wiped out; and in the true light of rights in voting--the
rights of associates in a contract to express their choice--few
questions will affect wide territories. Rarely will any question be, in
the sense the word is now used, national; the ballot-box may never unite
the citizens of the Atlantic coast with those of the Pacific. Yet, in
this decomposition of the State into its natural units--in this
resolving of society into its constituent elements--may be laid the sole
true, natural, lasting basis of the universal republic, the primary
principle of which can be no other thing than freedom.




INDEX.