Is Universal Suffrage a Failure? A Lecture Delivered Before the Citizens of Ithaca, New York, October 17, 1878

Is universal suffrage in the United States a failure? My friend President White told you the other evening what he thought was the opinion of foreigners on that question. This evening a foreigner speaks for himself, — a foreigner, yet not an alien. Canada is a dependency of the British crown, but she is a community of the New World. She is a partner with you in the great experiment of equality. So deal with her, so bear yourselves towards her, if you can, in this crisis of your commercial relations with her which is impending, and on all occasions, that she may be true to the partnership, and learn not to dread the day in which the last lingering shadows of Old World aristocracy and privilege shall depart from these shores, and the New World shall wholly and forever be dedicated to humanity.

Voices of despondency are heard, — voices which have almost the accent of despair. Perhaps some reach the ears of us foreigners which do not reach yours. Skepticism sometimes unmasks to the foreigner which before fellow-countrymen wears the mask. Commercial men from England, going among the chiefs of commerce here, report that misgiving as to the value even of your most fundamental institutions is wide-spread and profound. They report that republicanism here begins to be like theological orthodoxy elsewhere, — openly professed and privately derided. Less important are the whispers of disaffection which Americans of the wealthier class, who have left their country for the pleasure haunts of Europe, sometimes breathe into the open ear of European aristocracy, and which have led aristocracy to hope, and to give practical expression to the hope, that the New World may after all be redeemed from equality. But a deeper significance belongs to the utterances of some of your eminent writers and thinkers, who with the lips not of social sycophancy, but of wailing patriotism, proclaim aloud and in thrilling accents the failure of universal suffrage.

In approaching this subject, let us put far away from us all demagogic cant and rant. Gone, forever gone, are the illusions as to the perfect wisdom and virtue of the people, and the all-sufficiency of popular freedom for the regeneration of society, which beguiled the pioneers of democracy, and perhaps to them were of service as Stimulants, without which they might have shrunk from the effort of overturning the thrones of the past. Sad experience has made it clear that institutions wisely framed are needed by all of us, in order to give that which is politically good in us the victory over that which is politically evil. I say by all of us. Alike in high and low, in rich and poor, in every condition and every walk of life, there are passions and interests which conflict with our public duty and are adverse to the common weal. Selfishness is the grand obstacle to political wisdom; and the rich, though commonly the best educated and the most intelligent, are not the least selfish. Let us eschew demagogism, but let us also eschew oligarchy, intellectual as well as social. One of Oneida’s heroes, an adorable officer in the British Guards, having been brought into contact with the populace in guarding the royal carriage, laves his gentility as soon as he gets home in a warm bath well dashed with eau de cologne. Oneida’s guardsman has his counterparts in the intellectual sphere. Renan, for example, appears to think that the mass of his fellow-men are a mob, to be held down lest its brutality should interfere with culture. He tells you coolly that the many must find their happiness in the enjoyments and the glory of the few, and it does not seem to occur to him that the enjoyments: of the few can possibly be marred or their glory dimmed by the misery of the many. Culture! Alas, where would culture be if those brutal masses did not support it by their daily toil ? The thought of what labor endures on the stubborn glebe, in the dismal wilderness, in the stifling factory, in the perilous mine, and on the stormy sea, — the thought of what the wives and mothers of the poor undergo in their housekeeping and child-bearing, — ought to banish every unbrotherly feeling from our breasts. Myriads of Renans are devoted to coarse and obscure toil that one may write and win the fame. These men look down from the height of their philosophy on the simplicity of Jesus of Nazareth; yet behold them, and the great Goethe too, wallowing in the mire of their cultivated selfishness, while He remains the brother of mankind.

We must also, to judge any particular system of government aright, have a worthy conception of government itselfIf it is merely a machine for the preservation of life and property, there may be something to be said in favor of an empire. But we hold that government is the organization of the community not merely for the preservation of life and property, though this no doubt is its primary purpose, but for all the objects, moral as well as material, which we may best attain by acting in common. We hold, with the great English statesman, that the best form of government is that which doth most actuate and dispose all members of the commonwealth to the common good. The characteristic excellence of such a government does not consist in mere order, such as the French empire maintained with the bayonet till the bayonet broke. Its excellence consists rather in general, active, and self-sacrificing devotion to the common weal. Nor is mere security its special promise. To attain great ends something must be risked. Much must be risked to attain so great an end as the brotherhood of man.

Every system ought to be tried by broad results. Let us try on that principle the strength and the integrity of the American government, and see whether there is any ground for despair.

There can hardly be a more crucial test of the strength of a government than its power of going through a perilous crisis without suspending the ordinary course of law and resorting to violent measures of repression. Nothing more decisively displays its confidence in the soundness of its foundations and the free allegiance of its people. When the aristocratic government of England, reputed the very type of strength, is threatened, or fancies itself threatened, by the French Revolution, what do we see? We see the ordinary course of law at once suspended, and recourse had to extraordinary measures of repression, — personal liberty interrupted; opinion gagged; the right of public meeting curtailed; government indictments for libel; a series of trials for constructive treason, in which conviction would have led to judicial murder; fair discussion punished as sedition; a young Scotch advocate, of blameless character, for speaking in favor of parliamentary reform, sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and told from the bench that he ought to be put to the torture; the land filled with spies; the judges turned into agents of police; private associations formed, with the sanction of government, for the manifest purpose of perverting justice; a reactionary reign of terror. This, although the war with the French republic was a foreign war, and those who then sympathized with the revolution in England were few and weak. The existence of the American government was threatened by a great rebellion on its own soil; the hostile armies menaced the capital; sympathy with the enemy was rife and avowed. Yet a stranger visiting the United States at that time saw no interruption of the ordinary course of law, no suspension of personal liberty, of the freedom of the press, of the right of public meeting, except on the actual scene of war. History can scarcely supply a parallel to this perfect reliance of a government on its moral strength and the unconstrained loyally of its people. The second election of Lincoln took place at the acme of excitement, when every other family had a member in the field for the Union or in a soldier’s grave; yet there was not only perfect order, maintained without any intervention of the police, but perfect respect for every right, not only of voting, speaking, and writing, but of public demonstration. What government in Europe could safely have allowed sympathy with a great rebellion to hangout its banner in all the Streets? Never to be forgotten, either, are those predictions of military usurpation and sabre sway as the sure result of civil war, uttered with exultation by euemies, with sorrow by friends, warranted by the experience of history, but belied by the republican loyalty of the generals and the immediate return of the armies to civil life.

The second election of Lincoln struck an observer at the time as a signal proof of self-control on the part of the people, as well as of conscious strength and security on the part of the government. Where else would you have found, under similar circumstances, the same toleration extended by the dominant party to its opponents? Majorities are tyrannical, and will be so till our reason gains a greater control than it now has over our passions. But the majority which could respect the free speech, free action, and public demonstrations of the minority in 1864 was not the most jealous or cruel of tyrants.

Then as to integrity, we will by no means strive to hide the weak places, but we will hold to the principle of judging by broad results, In fourteen years, as the president was saying the other day, a third of the debt has been paid off, the interest greatly reduced, taxation materially lightened, the credit of the nation raised to a level second only to that of the credit of England. How could this have been done if honesty had not prevailed, on the whole, both in the central administration and in all the agencies through which the revenue is collected and disbursed? In what state are the finances, and how stands the credit, of Spain, where the reverse of honesty is the rule? So with regard to the administration of the law. The system of electing the judges for a limited term, instead of appointing for life, appears. to us foreigners bad, and we hold it not. surprising that there should have been eases of judicial corruption. Yet on the whole it is evident that property is secure; right is done between suitors; crime is punished; confidence in the judiciary is generally felt. Nobody expects in an American judge to find a Spanish alcalde or a Turkish cadi.

Again, what is the conduct of the republic towards other nations? Has it not, since the violent: and overbearing spirit of slavery departed, been at least as moderate and as righteous as that of any other nation with equal means and opportunities of aggrandizement? Canada rests in perfect security beside you, while Holland and Belgium are always turning; anxious eyes to the movements of their powerful neighbors. Mexico gives you a sufficient pretext for war about once a month, yet she is not conquered. San Domingo lays herself at your feet, and is rejected. Meantime, those who have most loudly accused you of unprincipled ambition annex the Transvaal and Cyprus, and are now preparing to conquer Afghanistan. If any charge were to be made against you, it would rather be that of excessive non-intervention. After all, the American republic is the tutelary power of the New World, and provided she keeps clear, as she seems resolved to do, of self - aggrandizement, she may act in that capacity with benefit not only to the weaker communities, but to herself, since the minds of her people will thus be sometimes diverted from internal strife. The determination not to annex Cuba is evidently wise as well as moral: a republic is not like an empire; the law of its being forbids it to annex anything which it cannot thoroughly incorporate. But it was difficult not to feel a pang when the island, after its long and desperate struggle, fell back under the domination of Spain, the most despicable among the Old World powers of iniquity, — a power which is the last ditch of slavery and priest rule, and which, while for the most selfish ends it crushes its agonized dependency, cannot keep the flag of the foreigner off its own coast.

Surely, then, it is worth while to examine this system of government, to mark its defects and see what can be done to cure them, before you give way to despair. Surely, the spirit of hope, not that of despondency, ought to preside over reforms.

That universal suffrage, in the striet and literal sense of the term, has failed in some respects and produced serious evils assuredly is not to be denied. But that we may go forth to combat evil cheerfully and with vigor it is expedient to look at the good first. Experience has disclosed to us only three foundations on which a government can be built: hereditary right, sheer force, and the national will. Government here is based on the national will. The more extended the suffrage can be consistently with public, safety, the more complete will be the expression of the national will, the broader and the firmer will be the foundation. During the civil war no careful observer could fail to see what strength your government derived from the general feeling that it was the government of the whole people. That sentiment more, much more, than countervailed the sentiment of loyalty which in monarchical countries is felt towards a hereditary throne. We say the more extended the suffrage can be, in this point of view, the better, provided its extension be consistent with public safety. The public good is the sole criterion in politics; it is the measure of justice as well as of expediency. A man has a right to such institutions as will best promote the public good, in which his own is included; he has no other right in a civilized state, whatever he might have in the bush. The suffrage will of course be a failure if it is given to those who are manifestly disqualified for political life. It will be a failure, for instance, if it is given to those who cannot read, because they cannot possibly inform themselves about the questions on which they have to vote. A man who cannot read not only has-no right to the suffrage, he has a sacred right to be exempted from it , as a blind man has to be exempted from a public duty requiring eyesight. An education test or a security for education of some kind is an indispensable safeguard of universal suffrage. You will say you cannot get it; and we shall presently see why.

People absolutely devoid of political training and of the knowledge of political duty are in much the same case as those who cannot read. It is obviously of vital importance to a free state that naturalization laws should be strictly enforced. If there are immigrants radically alien as a race, socially and morally, to American civilization, their case must be decided by the same paramount rule of the public good, care being taken that the interest of the state is not confounded with industrial rivalry or inhuman antipathy of race. Negro enfranchisement, which it might have been difficult, from a foreign observer’s point of view, to defend on ordinary grounds of policy, at least in so sudden and sweeping a form, pleads as its justification the exigency of the civil war and the necessity of putting the sword of political self-protection into the hand of the emancipated slave.

Again, universal suffrage will fail if a distinction is not drawn between national and municipal government. In the objects of national government all have an equal share, and the poor perhaps most need the suffrage for their protection. Had the poorer classes of England enjoyed the suffrage they would have voted down the old criminal code, so lavish of the poor man’s blood; they would have voted down the corn laws, imposed by a landlord Parliament to keep up rents while the masses wanted bread; they would have voted down the war against the French republic, waged in the interest of the aristocracy to the ruin of the people. But a municipal government is mainly concerned with the collection and the disbursement of local taxes; and as these are proportional to property, so in some measure ought the power to be. The principle of the jointstock company is more applicable to municipalities than that of the nation. While the wealthier classes have lost, the poorer have in no way gained by municipal pillage, which has enriched the demagogues alone. Witness the condition of the poorer quarters of New York. The subject is one in which a Canadian has as much interest as you. On both sides of the line equally this problem of municipal government confronts us. It is one of the great problems of society on this continent.

Let us remember, however, that the grossly ignorant and the rowdies are not the only dangerous class. If, in some, envy of wealth breeds dark thoughts of pillage, there are others who provoke envy by the ostentation of wealth. You read of millionaires going about in a state rivaling that of kings, though probably not refined by royal taste. These are the great preachers of communism and repudiation. We could half sympathize with the communist who burns to pull Shoddy down. As moral and social beings, we would rather be governed by the rowdies than by the American colony in Paris as it was under the empire. There is yet another class dangerous in its way, — the class of seceders from political duly. Malcontents from this country are always telling their sympathizing friends in Europe that the best men here stand aloof from politics. The answer is that those who in a free country stand aloof from politics cannot be the best men. A man is not bound to seek the prizes of public life; he will perhaps exercise more influence for good if he does not; he is not bound to become the slave of party; he is not bound to sit in any conclave of political iniquity. But he is bound to do his utmost, in such ways as are morally open to him, to get the best men elected, and to make the right principles prevail. If he cannot do much, he is still bound to do what he can. Striking pictures have been drawn of men with high foreheads and intellectual countenances condemned to sit in council beside low brows and stolid faces. But would the matter be mended if the low brows and stolid faces had the council to themselves? We must say, however, that during the civil war it appeared to us that all classes of men in this country, if they did not actually go into public life, took an active part in the performance of public duty; that wealth and education proved themselves, by their efforts and sacrifices, to be nobly loyal to the republic, and showed thereby that the republic could not have been a very bad mother even to them.

Let us see precisely what the evil is, and trace it, if we can, to its source. It is not tyranny or oppression. Nobody complains of anything of that kind. It is not insecurity of life or property, at least in the settled States of the North, which are the fair specimens of the system. It is political corruption. That corruption does exist, that it is great, lamentable, and scandalous, all citizens and friends of the republic seem to own with sorrow and with shame. But at all events, we may feel pretty sure that we see the worst of it. The American republic is no dissembler; she washes all her dirty linen in the street. Not only so, but she even dirties some for the purpose. Every presidential election is a match game at slander between the two parties, and other nations believe both sides. The slightest scent of scandal seems to be followed up with the fell sagacity of the blood-hound. The faintest whisper of suspicion is swelled into thunder by the joyful acclaim of the hostile press, and reëchoed by the press of Europe. In England decorous silence is the rule. It is generally believed that the records of the railway mania in that country, if they could be opened, would tell a dark tale of corruption, parliamentary as well as general; but those records still sleep in peace. The payment of half a million of dollars to the firm of Rothschild for advancing the purchase money of the Suez Canal shares was said, even by the most cautious critics, to be a questionable transaction. In private this was said, but in public not a word. Everybody shrank from bringing forward a charge which could not be positively proved. Here the press and the country would have rung with the scandal. Here a public man of eminence is charged with having sold a cadetship at West Point for four hundred dollars depreciated paper currency, and with having employed a door-keeper of the House as his agent in the transaction; and the charge, instead of being scouted, becomes the subject of a solemn investigation which fills the world with dreadful ideas of American corruption. So with regard to commercial fraud. In the English newspapers the cases of commercial fraud appear to be about as thick and about as bad as they are in yours. But in the case of England, they are called exceptions; in the ease of America they are called the rule.

Commerce is corrupted by the gambling spirit which always attends a very rapid development of trade; and commercial corruption is a principal source of political corruption, both in the way of moral contagion, and through the bribery of legislators by the agents of dishonest speculation. It seems to be mainly in the commercial legislation, or what is called in England the privatebill legislation, that the evil prevails. We do not hear, at least upon trustworthy evidence, of great public measures being carried by bribery. Hence there is reason to think that the evil might be diminished by the simple expedient of delegating the decision of questions respecting railway and other commercial bills to a professional tribunal, subject still to the supreme authority of Congress; as in England the decision of election petitions has been delegated to the judges, without prejudice to the supreme authority of the House of Commons. England certainly would have been saved by such a tribunal from infinite waste of money, as well as from much jobbery and corruption. Something, probably much, might be done by a sharper law, meting out to the high and inexcusable the same measure of justice as to the low and excusable felon. The acceptance by a legislator of a bribe is a crime perfectly justiciable, as well as most heinous. Impeachment is a cumbrous remedy, and one which is sure to be perverted by party. A criminal tribunal inaccessible to party, and accessible to all citizens who seek justice, would be a good deal more to the purpose. Put into Sing Sing one legislator who has sold his trust, and the rest will be tired of the game. Laws are nothing without national character, but national character may be improved by laws. The national character of England was improved with reference to trusts by the fraudulent trustees act. Good judges ascribe the prosperity of French commerce partly to a sound commercial morality, and the soundness of the morality to the strictness and the rigorous execution of the law. These problems are common to all popular governments, and in speaking of them we are speaking of that which concerns all your partners in the experiment of freedom as well as you.

Another influence for which the suffrage is in no way responsible is at present affecting morality, political and general, in all countries. There is nothing in the history of opinion like the sudden breaking up of old beliefs during the last twenty, it might almost be said the last ten years. When one revisits England after a short absence, the progress strikes one as almost appalling. It is far greater than appears on the surface; for decorum still prescribes outward conformity to religion, and many religious skeptics support the state church on political grounds; indeed, they seem to support it the more zealously the more skeptical they become. Skepticism reigns in the intellectual classes and among the intelligent artisans, in conversation, in literature, and in the press. But the morality of the great mass of men has hitherto been bound up with their religion; at least, with their belief in an all-seeing God, and in an account to be rendered after death. One is not surprised to hear thoughtful men in England say that the effects of religious and moral skepticism begin to be felt in commerce, in politics, and in every walk of life. Far be it from us to cling to anything that has been proved untrue, or even to anything that is doubtful, for the purpose of supporting the social fabric. If there is a God, he is the God of truth, and to prop with falsehood is to prepare a heavier fall. But let those who pull down old beliefs remember the necessity of building up. Some rule of life higher than his animal nature man must have, or he will become a wild beast and need a keeper. In an old country, society is held together by immemorial authority, ingrained habit, consecrated custom, independently of individual belief; but in a democracy, each man must be, to a great extent, a law to himself; and here, if individual belief in the great sanctions of morality fails, social as well as moral anarchy may ensue.

On this subject of political corruption, public opinion, at all events, appears not yet to be hopelessly depraved. Bribery, no doubt, when committed in the interest of a party, is too easily condoned; but the acceptance of a bribe, or of illicit gain of any kind, seems still, if brought home to a man, to ruin him in public life. The same thing cannot be said of all countries under what is supposed to be the elevating influence of monarchical institutions.

The corruption in England during the last, century was appalling. Seats in Parliament, and the votes of members of Parliament, were constantly, almost avowedly, bought and sold. To carry a disgraceful peace through Parliament, a regular bribery office was opened, as Horace Walpole tells us, by the government, and bribes amounting to twentyfive thousand pounds were paid to members in one day. You could slip a bankbill into the hand even of a peer without offense. Government, in fact, subsisted by corruption. But from this, England, having vigorous life in her, emerged. There is now no bribery in England, —none at least of a pecuniary kind; for it ought to be remembered that millionaires are bribed by titles and decorations, which the government still uses as rewards for political support.

Of the corrupt we always hear; the trumpet of party rivalry tells their names loud enough. But no trumpet tells the names of those who through their whole lives serve the republic faithfully and die poor. That such there are we are most credibly assured ; our own observation in some measure confirms the assurance; and it is more effectually ratified by the general results of the administration in all departments, and particularly in the department of finance.

Universal suffrage has hitherto had the advantage of great safety-valves in the abundance of land and in commercial expansion. This cannot be too frankly admitted, nor can the attention of statesmen be too earnestly directed to the new exigencies which may arise when all the land is filled and commercial expansion has reached its limit; although it is to be observed that the land will not have been filled till it is all highly farmed, nor will commercial expansion have reached its limit till the land has been filled. For the general possession of property by the people, democracy itself may partly claim the credit, since it has abolished primogeniture and entail. But against these advantages must be set the difficulty of dealing with masses of immigrants, wholly untrained, for the most part, to the exercise of political power, and often embittered against all government by oppression suffered in their native land. The republic has received by millions, and has to a wonderful extent turned into citizens, victims of English misrule in Ireland and fugitives from the military system of Germany. American socialism is not native: it, is brought from lands where social wrong breeds wild schemes of redress in the hearts of the wronged. When the International tried to set fire to American society, it was like putting a match to the Hudson. Any one who visited the mining district of Pennsylvania, at the time of the Molly Maguire outrages, might easily satisfy himself that the men were not only immigrants, but for the most part industrial exiles of the wildest and most roving kind, — many of them probably ringleaders of strikes in the old country.

The times just now are bad. The republic is meeting the heavy bill drawn upon the future by the civil war. She feels the loss of all the wealth, actual and prospective, which was fired away in gunpowder. She feels it the more because for the time the war expenditure produced a factitious prosperity. The poorest, of course, suffer most. Discontent, disaffection, industrial conspiracy, angry illusions, both social and economical, are the natural result. How was it in England after the long war with France? For many years English society heaved with political sedition and industrial strife. There were Cato Street conspiracies, Peterloo massacres, Luddite disturbances, destruction of machinery, Bristol in flames and in the hands of rioters, conflicts with the military, wild outcries against the national creditor, mad currency theories, proposals to apply the sponge to the national debt. Till 1819, when cash payments were resumed, an inconvertible paper currency aggravated the industrial distress and the disaffection which was its consequence. It was certain that as in England so in the United States, inconvertible paper money would produce fluctuation of prices, confusion, hardship, and industrial disturbance, and that there would be no relief without a return to a sound currency such as that on which the wisdom of Peel and other English statesmen resolved in 1819. Let us be just. This movement which you are combating and which you regard as repudiation in disguise has not its source in mere dishonesty; it is like the similar movement in England, the offspring of real and pressing hardship. An inconvertible paper currency breeds not only confusion but wrong. Mortgagors and other debtors are crushed by debts which they contracted in depreciated paper, but which they have to pay in coin. The conduct of American sufferers calling for Inflation to lighten their burdens is at least no worse than that of the English land owners after the French war, when, finding that the monopoly which they had en joyed during the war was being taken from them by the importation of foreign grain, they made the Parliament. which was entirely in their power, pass the corn law to keep up prices, while the people, after just tasting of plenty, were thrust back into privation. If the present demand were not that the currency should be again debased, commerce again demoralized, and the gambling-table of gold speculation restored to noxious activity, but that mortgage and other debts should be reduced to the value really received by the borrower, whatever objection there might be on the ground of practicability, there would scarcely be an objection on the ground of justice.

Of the dangers of the present situation no small part is the result of slavery. Even the worst excesses of democracy, or what we foreigners think its worst excesses, in the North, such as the abrogation of the life tenure of the judges and the consequent diminution of the independence of the judiciary, seem to have been rather the work of the Northern allies of the Southern aristocracy than of democracy in the proper sense of the term. Massachusetts continues to appoint her judges for life, But for slavery universal suffrage is not responsible. The responsibility rests historically on a far different power. The Tory rulers of England in the reign of Anne, the political progenitors of those who patronized the Alabama, made the queen proclaim to Parliament the glad tidings of her having obtained for the country a share of the Spanish slave trade. Slavery created at the South a social system radically antagonistic to the social system of the North, and it was necessary that one of the two should die. If slavery had lived it would have filled the New World with social, moral, and economical poison. In this, perhaps, posterity will find the justification of the war rather than in any legal right of coercion. Would we were able to say that the traces of slavery, like the commercial crisis, were temporary as well as unconnected with democracy, and that they might be expected, in the course of nature, soon to pass away! Alas, this juxtaposition of two races, one, besides its mental inferiority, bearing the brand of former servitude on its brow, seems likely, for generations to come, to be the difficulty and the danger of the republic! Divided from each other as they are by the whole scale of humanity, how can the Anglo-American and the negro ever be fused into a community? The commons of Rome, though they had wrung from the exclusive patriciate a share of offices and political power, thought their enfranchisement incomplete till they had obtained the right of intermarriage with patricians. Frame your civil rights law as you will, you cannot have real political equality without social equality, and you cannot have social equality without intermarriage.

Lastly, we must not lay to the charge of the democratic principle, or of universal suffrage as its general embodiment, defects in the special machinery of any democratic institutions. There were sure to be such defects in the constitution of the United States. The framers of that constitution were perhaps the wisest statesmen of their time; but they could not be exempt from the prejudices and illusions of their age. They had very little experience to guide them. Democracy on a large scale was new. The republics of antiquity were not democracies, but republics of masters supported by the labor of slaves, in which slavery settled the most formidable of the political problems with which modern democracy has to deal. The only precedent in point was the ill-starred and short-lived, though glorious, commonwealth of England. In your Revolution there were two elements,—one akin to the French Revolution, the other British and constitutional; the first represented by Jefferson, and the second by Hamilton. With both came illusions. With the French element came the false belief in popular perfection and in the all-sufficiency of freedom, which received its hideous refutation in the excesses of the French Revolution; perhaps, also, that general dislike of government and disposition to confound lawful authority with tyranny, which in its influence upon the household, and upon legislation respecting the internal relations of the family, constitutes about the gravest peril of this country, political as well as moral, because anarchical tendencies bred in the home are sure to extend to the character of the citizen. With the British element came those misconceptions regarding the distribution of power under the British constitution which then universally prevailed, and had taken captive even the intellect of Montesquieu. Everybody at that time fancied that the king of England was still, as he had been in the period of the Tudors, a real ruler; whereas he had become a figure-head, reigning and not governing, while the government was carried on by responsible ministers, chosen for him by Parliament. Everybody then fancied that the House of Lords was a senate, revising in the light of its maturer wisdom the more impulsive legislation of the popular house; whereas it was not a senate, but an estate of the old feudal realm, representing not political maturity, but territorial privilege and social caste. Everybody then fancied that power was really distributed between king, lords, and commons, and that in this distribution lay the grand secret of the British constitution; whereas the House of Commons had in fact reduced the House of Lords to comparative impotence, as well as the king to nullity, and had drawn the substance of supreme power to itself. All the world went astray after constitutional kings and revising senates, imagining that this was the road to British liberty, and the sure road of political salvation.

Your president is evidently the British king reproduced in an elective form. But a foreign observer may doubt whether the reproduction was necessary or wise. A single head certainly is not a universal necessity, since Switzerland does without one. An office such as the elective presidency is at once the grand prize and the most powerful stimulant of faction: it keeps selfish ambition and intrigue constantly at work; it breeds and advances to influence a crowd of men skilled in bad electioneering arts. Every four years it brings burning questions to a dangerous head. It caused the question of slavery, which might otherwise have smoldered on, to burst into the flame of civil war. The periodical revolution which it involves is fatal to anything like stability of policy or forecast on the part of the government. Why should we not all do, as Switzerland does, with an executive council elected by the national legislature? Harmony between the executive and the legislature might be preserved and steadiness of policy secured at the same time by having the council elected, not all at once, but by periodical installments. The first of these two essential objects would perhaps be better secured by such a system than it is by the present. To restore harmony between the two powers in the case of President Andrew Johnson, you were compelled to resort to the extreme measure of impeachment. The two legislative chambers, again, federal and in each State, — are they really necessary, or are they, like the system of two chambers in Europe, merely a misguided imitation of the two houses in England ? This question applies specially to the state legislatures: in the federal legislature the senate has a distinct ground of existence as representing the federal principle; but in the state legislatures both chambers alike represent the people of the State, and are, with variations as to terms and modes of election, duplicates of each other. Would not well-devised rules of proceeding and the requirement of an absolute majority, or even more for the passage of an opposed bill, be as good a security for considerate legislation as the clashing of two separate chambers? If the two chambers differ decidedly on a serious question, or the party which is in a majority in one of them is in a minority in the other, they will not temper each other’s actions, but collide and produce a deadlock, as they have just been doing in the British colony of Victoria.

They who propose to set matters right by giving the American cabinet, like the British cabinet, seats in the legislative body illustrate once more the prevalence of illusions respecting the nature of the British constitution. In the British Parliament there is really, as we have said, only one chamber, the House of Commons, which has practically engrossed the supreme power. A ministry, therefore, which has a majority in the House of Commons is able to carry its measures through Parliament. But in the American Congress there are not only formally but really two chambers, and unless the cabinet could command a majority in both, confusion, legislative as well as executive, would ensue. For the British cabinet, be it observed, is not merely an executive; it assumes the control of legislation, and when it loses that control it falls. Moreover, if the cabinet were in Congress, like the parliamentary government, in England it would have to take all the responsibility; with the responsibility must go the power; and the president would have to follow the advice of his ministers, and would become, like the British king, a figure-head.

The multiplication of legislators, and paid legislators, to which the system of two chambers leads, if it is not a necessity, is itself an evil. It renders the cost of republican government really greater than the cost of any monarchy. What is worse, it is sure to breed a swarm of professional politicians, who are tempted to leave the regular paths of industry for that which is the highest of all callings, but the vilest of all trades.

But of all institutions imported from the Old World or formed here in imitation of it, the most questionable is parV ty government. Burke defines party as “ a body of men united for promoting, by their joint endeavors, the national interest on some particular principle in which they are agreed.” The pureminded Burke thinks only of principle and the national interest; he says nothing about power and pelf; yet he saw Fox and North, with their factious and venal trains, united in endeavoring to govern the country for objects in which they were all agreed, but with which principle and national interest had nothing to do. But let that pass. To justify the permanent division of a nation into parties, the principle of division must obviously be perpetual. But what perpetual principle of division exists or can be imagined ? What principle is there that will forever separate from each other, and range in opposing hosts, men equally sensible and equally patriotic ? Such a principle it must be, because otherwise one of your parties will be a party of the bad, and you will have to dedicate half your citizens to evil in order to keep your system in existence. Suppose real issues fail, as fail they must and do. Are we to go on fabricating factitious issues, merely to provide party with a basis ? This is what is actually done. In Canada, for instance, all the great questions having been settled, real issues of sufficient importance failed, and the two parlies became mere personal combinations wrestling with each other for power. Party has its uses. In England it was the necessary organ of resistance to the encroachments of royal prerogative, as it is now the necessary organ of resistance to aristocratic reaction. In this country it was the necessary organ of resistance to slavery, and a foreigner cannot presume to say that it may not still be the necessary organ of resistance to repudiation or to movements subversive of the settlement made in 1865. In such cases a good citizen is warranted in submitting his reason and conscience in some measure to party discipline, for the sake of the great and permanent object to be secured. But can it be seriously maintained that a party struggle for the offices of state is the normal and permanent basis of good government? Does not such a struggle inevitably evoke all the passions, all the cupidities, all the malignant activities which render good government impossible ? Under such a system, where are good and sensible men to find their place? They certainly will not find it among the slaves of party. They will be self-ostracized, and power will fall more and more into bad hands. Let us not deceive ourselves, Party, under ordinary circumstances, is a fine name for faction, and faction is the ruin of free states. All other subjects of human interest are passing, by an irresistible movement, out of the domain of party and passion into the domain of science, and why should politics be an everlasting exception? So far from being essentially connected with universal suffrage, party is its practical subverter. Under the system of party management, with its caucuses, its wirepulling, and its close nominations, who except the managers really has a vote?

Why is it hopeless to propose an education test for the suffrage? Because if one party proposed it, the other party would at once espouse the cause of ignorance for the sake of its vote. Why is it hopeless to agitate for a permanent civil service? Because party cannot afford to dispense with the engine of patronage. A permanent and properly trained civil service would not work miracles, but it would be likely to increase the efficiency, economy, and integrity of the public service, as signal experience shows. Whether British empire in India is a good thing or not, the body of highly trained administrators which rules that empire is as pure a government as any in the world. West Point officers during your war wore exposed to the same temptations as other men in power; yet I do not remember that I ever heard a West Point officer charged with corruption. The same spirit of corporate honor would probably animate a civil service if it were placed upon a similar footing. As to the danger of bureaucracy, it could hardly be very great in a community so self-reliant and so political as this. But the best part of a reform of this kind is that it reduces to a minimum the amount of personal and pecuniary inducement for seeking a change of government, and insures as far as possible that the change shall be sought, if at all, on public grounds alone.

If we are not mistaken, when the people are carried in some measure out of the direct influence of party an improvement becomes visible in their political character and in their legislative wisdom. It appears at least that the amendment of state constitutions — that of the constitution of the State of New York, for example—has been carried on in a calmer spirit and with better results than ordinary legislation, and that the people on these occasions have shown a willingness to accept reforms even of a conservative kind, such as a lengthened tenure for the judiciary and the minority clause.

One hears loud complaints against the press, its violence, its rancor, its untruthfulness, its narrowness of view, Reformers propose, as a remedy, to give journalists a regular training for their profession ,—to teach them history, jurisprudence, political science. This is very good; but teach the journalist what you will, if you send him into the service of party, you send him out of the service of truth. Nor can it be hoped that party criticism will check political abuses. Abuses cannot be checked, nor can the authors of abuses be kept in awe, by criticism that is indiscriminate and notoriously, almost professedly, unfair. Such criticism cloaks guilt by confounding innocence with it; it defiles everything, and purifies nothing.

Of Course in speaking of defects in the machinery of the constitution we do not insist on details; we may be mistaken about all the special points that we have mentioned. But we do venture to insist on the general fact that, the const itution, framed at the time and under the influences that it was, would be likely to contain such defects, entirely apart from universal suffrage and the general principles of democracy; and that they may, partly perhaps by the application of the historical method, be discovered, and when discovered may be removed without touching the life of the republic.

When we have separated from American democracy that which is not an essential part of it; when we have made allowance for extraneous influences and temporary pressures; when we have distinguished curable defects in the machinery of the system from inherent and incurable vices; and when, having done this, we survey the actual condition, material and social, of the American people, a foreign observer, while he must believe that there is much need of reform, and while he follows with the eye of anxious sympathy the efforts of reformers, can see no reason for despair. Perhaps his confidence will be greater if he has lived not only in the great cities, where with much to excite admiration there is much to create misgiving, but in the country also, and there seen the strong foundations of the republic.

And if you despair of democracy, whither will you flee? As was said before, apart from sheer force, experience presents to us no basis for government except the national will and hereditary right. Hereditary monarchy is apparently dying even in the Old World. It lingers in the primeval East; it lingers in half-Asiatic Russia; but its decadence in more civilized Europe is pronounced. Legitimacy and divine right are leaving the scene with the last Bourbons. France is a republic. Political writers now class England, notwithstanding her monarchical forms, as a republic also: and in the other countries, although monarchy exists, its attributes are greatly shorn and its character is profoundly altered by the revolutions. Scarcely a monarch sits by the same title as his father, and with his father’s prerogative, on his father’s throne. As to hereditary aristocracy, perhaps it may be said that in all lands social servility, which is one pillar of it, is still pretty strong; but the other pillars of it, primogeniture and entail, it would be difficult to set up in a land which had once known justice. An empire of force like that of the Bonapartes was proposed some years ago, but without the smallest effect on public opinion. If you wanted an empire of force you allowed the opportunity of securing it to slip, for the road to such an empire lies through revolution and civil war.

There seems to be nothing for it, then, but to purify the republic. So, in a tone of pensive resignation, says an able and in the best sense patriotic writer after a mournful description of republican evils. So might a foreign observer say, in a more cheerful tone, if he were not too well aware that no one but a citizen knows the bitterness that is in the heart of his own country. What a foreigner may without misgiving say is that to purify the republic, if it is the hardest of all political tasks, is by far the highest; that it has produced characters nobler than have been produced by political effort of any other kind; and that the result to which, if successfully performed, it leads is the grandest, the happiest, and the most enduring that the political imagination can conceive.

Goldwin Smith.