ARBITRARY SEARCHES AND SEIZURES of the state as a whole is involved, are to that extent affected with a public interest and fit subjects for governmental regula tion, inspection, and control, and even of governmental entry when that entry is reasonable and reasonably necessary. This is a new theory of government for the in dividualistic Englishman of the old school. It is a theory which comes to be accepted later in a frontier than in a well-settled com munity. Pioneers are preeminently in dividualists. He who lives upon the frontier can do much as he pleases; he comes but little in contact with his fellowmen; it is not difficult for him to so use his own that he injures not that of another, because he rarely comes in contact with that other, and he consequently acquires the habit of doing as he pleases. He naturally rebels and chafes when collectivism and its rules and limitations are thrust upon him. This is the reason why criminal prosecutions are proportionately so numerous in our western states during the formative period of their growth. It is the theory that the duty of the citizen does not merely involve the duty to support the state, to keep the king's peace, and to refrain from acts which under the rude code of the past were deemed to involve moral turpitude, but in a large measure to be a gentleman, and to care for, protect, and diligently guard the health and welfare of others, of employees, of visi tors, of customers, and of the public at large. It is a step in the direction of making the moral code of the New Testament the basis of the criminal law and of the law of the land. There can be no doubt that the American colonist, at the time of the revolution, was an intense believer in personal rights and personal liberty. The keynote, indeed, of all English revolutions up to that time had been individualism, and this idea was car ried further in America than anywhere else. Everywhere in America was to be noted a militant individualism, not merely the revul sion of a high-spirited people against the feudalism of the past and the assertion of
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arbitrary power by an alien parliament, or the refusal of the right of representation which that feudalism upheld. Not merely the individualism of the Calvinist, but the individualism of the frontier, of the selfsupporting landed proprietor. The several states were jealous of their individual liberty and their respective citizens were equally jealous of their personal liberty. Up to and including the struggle in America the whole growth of the English revolution, in which the war in America was merely a chapter, was a story of individualism. The colonists in America were insisting upon the recognition of the same theories of consti tutional government which Oliver Cromwell insisted upon in his struggle against Charles I, and to which the English people at a later period made William III subscribe. Neither the barons who met at Runnymede, nor the Roundheads who fought at Naseby, nor the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock, nor even the American revolutionists themselves had any broad realization of the solidarity of mankind or of the doctrine of human rights which fired Lafayette and which so dignified the earlier stages of the French revolution. They wanted liberty, but they wanted it for themselves; they wanted freedom of wor ship, but freedom of worship for themselves alone. The barons at Runnyniede de manded the privileges granted for the free men of England alone, and at that time seventy- five per cent of the population were in the thralls of serfdom. The Puritans of the old and the newer England were almost as merciless in their persecutions of those who did not conform to their particular religious beliefs as were the Spanish inquisi tors themselves. They rarely got beyond the idea of a small religious or industrial unit. The merchant classes of Liverpool, of Bristol, of Boston, and of Newport were perhaps more active in and reaped more plentiful harvests from the African slave trade than did the inhabitants of any other cities. The growtli of a broad civic
