Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/424

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
408
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of promoting a more generous nationality. This was twenty-five years before the university ideal was reached in America. His conception of a university included all that our most venerable institutions have yet realized.

Lieber struggled for eight years before he found any permanent employment. In 1828 he began the work of editing the Encyclopædia Americana, and in his project he was warmly supported by Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and Judge Story. He yearned for the time when he might be able to write upon subjects that had long occupied his mind. In 1835 his hopes were realized by his appointment to the professorship of history and political economy in South Carolina College. In his contact with Niebuhr at Home he had acquired a taste for historical studies, and he became the first great teacher in this country of history and politics as co-ordinated subjects.

It was Lieber's lot to encounter many obstacles in his career. Although as a boy his soul longed for liberty, he found even in America a part of the human race in bondage, and this earnest advocate of freedom was compelled to make his home in the very midst of the slave power. Lieber did not desire to go to the South, but after a struggle of eight years in the North he felt compelled to accept the position in order to provide for his family. It also afforded him leisure time to write his Political Ethics, Legal and Political Hermeneutics, and Civil Liberty and Self-Government, the three great works upon which his fame will chiefly rest. In 1856 he was a candidate for the presidency of the college, and, failing to secure this position, he resigned his professorship. The next year, he was called to Columbia College, New York city. Dr. Herbert B. Adams states that the call of Lieber to Columbia College marks the first recognition by a Northern college of history and politics as properly co-ordinated subjects. Lieber spent nearly forty years as a teacher of this most vital branch to the youth of the republic.

Before tracing out the leading theories of Lieber's works, it may be well to refer to the political thought of his day. His youth was spent in a period when in his own country two opposing schools of law and political science existed. The historical school based its method upon the course of outward events and their evolution, while the philosophical school began with the knowledge of the human mind, and from this starting point considered the revelation of the spirit of man in history. Dr. Bluntschli says that only a few philosophers have had the genius to unite the two methods. Lieber rose above the conflict of the two schools and became one of the first representatives of their alliance. In writing his great works he had to venture upon an untrodden path, and, in his Political