Every village square used to have a statue of some national hero, and there are many still standing. Sometimes they were cast in the likeness of a departed political leader or sometimes a military hero. One of the statues that I have always liked best represents neither a statesman nor a general, nor even an ordinary soldier in some past war. It stands atop the State House in Providence, Rhode Island. Contrary to expectations, it is not a likeness of Roger Williams, George Washington, or some other colonial patriot. It is a statue identified only as "The Independent Man" and he was put there to watch over the affairs taking place under the dome of the State House.

I like to think that if we look hard enough, we might see the Independent Man waving at us, trying to redirect our attention to something we seem to have forgotten. I think he would like to remind us that the people of little Rhode Island put him atop the State House because they understood the importance of the individual in a democratic society and because they knew that a government of and by the people can be no better than the citizens themselves.

The importance of the Independent Man in our society has

There is little doubt that our days are troubled, that the world is large and complex, but this condition is not new. We are told in graphic terms about the specter of nuclear extinction, but few journalists remember and none write of the time in the fourteenth century when the Black Death killed at least one-third, and perhaps as much as one-half, of the population of Europe and Asia. No one had any idea how to halt its deadly spread, or any reason to believe that the human race would survive. Tens of thousands of European villages disappeared from the face of the earth and several centuries passed before Europe's population was restored. Barbara Tuchman recounts that "the sense of a vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair ... people felt in Walsingham's words that 'the world could never again regain its former prosperity.' " These words have the contemporary ring of the seven o'clock news.

The study of history has its uses, and one of them is to provide some measure of perspective, so lacking in our world today. But even those who cannot, or will not, learn from history might still profit from a more careful reading of the daily papers. All this nonsense about the powerlessness of the individual came at a point in history when we witnessed one man, Lech Walesa of Poland, take on the enormous might of the Soviet Union.

It was a stunning achievement of enormous import. No

As we look around and take stock, we can perceive that even when the problems we face may be significantly different from those of yesterday, their solution still depends upon individuals working the problem and not upon vague programs constructed by institutions. And yet, almost imperceptibly, we have been shifting not only the responsibility for a solution to someone else but the blame for the problem itself. All of our troubles, we are told, are caused by the government or by institutions which are somehow separate and apart from you and me and which, therefore, have the responsibility to resolve them. John Stuart Mill never suffered from this illusion.

If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in all its senses . . . depends, we find . . . the one which transcends all others is the qualities of the human beings comprising the society over which government is exercised.

What have we been doing to these qualities of human beings-in short, to our individual value systems? It takes more than a little study to find out, because our attention has been directed away from the real problem. This is not unusual, because one of the fundamentals of stage show magic, demagogic politics, and good football is misdirection. With attention focused on one hand, the other is left free to do its work unseen; or while most of the players flow to the right side, the ball carrier is running to the left. In magic and in sports, one has to sustain the illusion for only a moment to pull off the trick or the play. In politics and economics the time frame required to succeed with misdirection is longer,

The art of misdirection may also be applied to oneself. One does not have to look far to learn that an individual's moral behavior is increasingly proclaimed to be nobody else's business. We impose fewer and fewer restrictions on our own conduct as individuals, asserting everyone's right to a personal life style. Yet simultaneously we impose harsher, and increasingly irrational, restrictions on all of our institutions. We seem to feel that if we demand less of ourselves, the balance can be maintained by requiring more of corporate and government entities-a sort of moral equivalent to the law of thermodynamics. The results are reflected in endless paradoxes. Irving Kristol has pointed out that it is now perfectly legal for a nineteen-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie, but only if she is paid the minimum wage.

People's right to live as they please has been accompanied by the growing conviction that there are no honest men and women left in the world. Since no one can be required by law to have principles, we conclude that no one does. Acting on that assumption, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act, which requires a listing of the income from every source and any conflict of interest, real or imagined, now or in the future. The only office in the United States Government that now can be filled from a profession schooled in that discipline without attracting comments about conflicts of interest is that of the Attorney General-perhaps because lawyers write the conflict-of-interest laws and only lawyers become attorneys general. No one who knows as much about energy as the Attorney General is supposed to know about law would be allowed to run the Department of Energy-a critical problem of our time. All this is done in the name of trying to assure ourselves that our institutions will display standards of morality higher than those we set for ourselves.

Looking at recent history, I think that we came close to our political nadir a few years ago in the Senate confirmation hearings of Nelson Rockefeller as Vice-President of the

Most of the people present at our Constitutional Convention were landed, educated men with personal perspectives and problems. yet they forged a document that balanced the power between various sections of the country and the society in a way that stood the test of time. Had they been obliged to pass the conflict-of-interest test, it is doubtful that many of them could have walked through the door.

Perhaps it is time to examine this phenomenon; not the law so much as the philosophy which created it. A great teacher once told me that every time you read a new book, you should also go back and read an old one. It is not a bad prescription if we want to regain some perspective. There are many old books that deserve an occasional visit. One was written by a man named Smith who saw the world clearly and had few illusions about human nature. He understood the relationship between the individual and society. Adam Smith, like John Stuart Mill, knew that society and the individuals who make it up are one and the same thing. Smith believed in a strong national defense which depends on government. But he also

The moral authority of the individual, which in the past sustained freedom, is being sapped by the growing moralism of the advocates of collectivism . . . we need to be more aware than we are that freedom has no built-in presumptives of its own.

If you would look to another old book written by a man who understood much about America, the words of de Tocqueville come to mind:

It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great. I wish that they would try a little more to make a great man; that would set less value on the work and more upon the workman.

The town of Appleton, Wisconsin, when I was a boy growing up there, had a police force, a school system, a mayor, and a jail-and they were all busy. We did not think of individuals

Yet the transference machine operates today across the whole spectrum of society, from explanations of why Johnny can't read to the high cost of health care. A recent foundation study came to the remarkable conclusion that good individual teachers have a marked effect on how much students learn. If the report were not so solemn it would be hilarious. No one denies the enormous cost of health care in America, which now amounts to over 10 percent of our gross national product. What we do not want to come to grips with is the enormous cost of self-inflicted disease which inflates hospital costs. The leading cause of admission in many hospitals is alcoholism. The link between cigarette smoking and several diseases is too close to be ignored. Whether we eat too much, smoke too much, or drink too much is an individual choice and is not controlled by big government, or big institutions, or big media, or caused by the system. Yet somehow it is always "the country" which has a drinking problem, or an obesity problem, or a health problem, and only the government ought to be doing something about it.

There is still time in America to respond to that independent man who cries to us from a rooftop in Rhode Island. We should be wary of any group which asserts that it alone has discovered what social morality ought to be, no less than we should guard against any group that would combine political and economic power enforced by the rule of law. We must take great care to avoid rendering unto Caesar the things that are not his, for the long history of man shows that when you