"In the sixteen years during which it will have been in possession of
the government at the expiration of the present Presidential term,
all the evils which call so loudly for redress have had their origin,
their persistent and daily growth. Nearly all its thinkers, speakers,
and writers, its active intellect and its power of leadership are
imbued with strong government theories of so extravagant a character
that even Hamilton would have disowned and doubtless would have
condemned them. The classes who desire pecuniary profit from existing
governmental abuses have become numerous and powerful beyond any
example in our country. The myriads of officeholders, with enhanced
salaries, and often with illicit gains; the contractors and jobbers;
the beneficiaries of congressional grants of the public property or of
special franchises; the favored interests whose business is rendered
lucrative by legislative bounties or legislative monopolies; the
corporations whose hopes and fears are appealed to be the measures
of the government; the rapacious hordes of carpet-baggers who have
plundered the impoverished people of the South at least ten times as
much as Tweed's Ring did the rich metropolis, and whose fungus growth
is intertwined with the roots of the Republican party; all these
classes are not only interested in perpetuating existing evils and
existing wrongs, but they are the main agencies and instruments by
which that work is done."
This is the key-note of Mr. Tilden's view of our Federal politics in
1873. Unhappily, there is nothing in this statement upon which we can
boast to-day of any considerable improvement.
MR. TILDEN RESIGNS THE CHAIRMANSHIP OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
COMMITTEE[63]
"GENEVA, IN SWITZERLAND, _Aug. 1873_.
"MY DEAR SIR,--As I shall not be able to return home in season to take
part in the political canvass of this fall, I desire through you to
request the delegate to the State convention who will be chosen from my
district to say for me that I decline a re-election as member-at-large
of the State committee and as its chairman.
"What the country now needs in order to save it is a revival of the
Jeffersonian democracy, with the principles of government and rules
of administration, and with the high standard of official morality
which were established by the political revolution of 1800. At that
time the infant institutions of the republic were imperilled by the
same evil tendencies which have to-day attained a larger development.
The demoralizations of war--a spirit of gambling adventure, engendered
by false systems of public finance; a grasping centralism, absorbing
all functions from the local authorities, and assuming to control
the industries of individuals by largesses to favored classes from
the public treasury of moneys wrung from the body of the people by
taxation--were then, as now, characteristics of the period. The party
which swayed the government, though embracing many elevated characters,
was dominated, as an organization, by the ideas of its master-spirit,
Alexander Hamilton. Himself personally pure, he nevertheless believed
that our American people must be governed, if not by force, at least
by appeals to the selfish interests of classes, in all the forms of
corrupt influence. I recently met here--in the birthplace of Albert
Gallatin--a son of that great man, and himself a distinguished
American. Speaking in the light of the unsullied traditions of that
day, as well as of its public history, he said that the jobbery and
corruption and laxity of official morals were as great, proportionally,
then as now. If this be a true judgment, the reaction which was
effected and which gave us half a century of comparatively pure
administration is an encouragement that official morals and public life
may be again lifted from degradation. As the means of the reaction of
1800, Thomas Jefferson founded and organized the Democratic party. He
set up anew the broken foundations of governmental power. He stayed
the advancing centralism. He restored the rights of the States and the
localities. He repressed the meddling of government in the concerns of
private business, remitting the management of the industries of the
country to the domain of the individual judgment and conscience. He
not only brought the administration into conformity with principles
which lessen the occasions and the motives for corruption, but he
enforced, by precept and by example, purity and disinterestedness in
official life. He refused to appoint relatives to office. He declined
all presents. He refrained, while in the public service, from all
enterprises to increase his private fortune.
The immense ascendency over the public opinion of the country acquired
by Mr. Jefferson--the complete triumph of the party he formed and led,
the acceptance at length by the whole people of him as the highest
political authority--shaped the course of government in the United
States for half a century. That period will stand in all history as the
golden age of the republic.
The reformatory work of Mr. Jefferson in 1800 must now be repeated.
Organizations and names are important only as they are available for
the result. Every patriotic citizen, sincerely desirous of reform,
should discard all prejudices and accept the benefaction from any
source which is capable of providing it.
But it is quite clear that the Republican party now swaying the
administration, although it embraces large numbers of honorable and
patriotic citizens, is, as a whole, incapable of this specific mission.
In the sixteen years during which it will have been in possession of
the government at the expiration of the present Presidential term,
all the evils which call so loudly for redress have had their origin,
their persistent and daily growth. Nearly all its thinkers, speakers
and writers, its active intellect and its power of leadership, are
imbued with strong-government theories of so extravagant a character
that even Hamilton would have disowned and doubtless would have
condemned them. The classes who desire pecuniary profit from existing
governmental abuses have become numerous and powerful beyond any
example in our country. The myriads of officeholders, with enhanced
salaries, and often with illicit gains; the contractors and jobbers;
the beneficiaries of Congressional grants of the public property or of
special franchises; the favored interests whose business is rendered
lucrative by legislative bounties or legislative monopolies; the
corporations whose hopes and fears are appealed to by the measures
of the government; the rapacious hordes of carpet-baggers who have
plundered the impoverished people of the South at least ten times
as much as Tweed's Ring did the rich metropolis, and whose fungus
growth is intertwined with the roots of the Republican party; all
these classes are not only interested in perpetuating existing evils
and existing wrongs, but they are the main agencies and instruments
by which that work is done. They furnish organization, they supply
numerous partisans who devote themselves to electioneering while the
honest citizens are compelled to earn their daily bread by the sweat
of their brow; they contribute and aggregate vast sums of money to be
expended in conducting party canvasses, in influencing the elections
and in corrupting the voters; sums which no number of disinterested
citizens could furnish if equally unscrupulous in the methods of
political influence. For the first time in our national history such
classes have become powerful enough to aspire to be in America the
ruling classes, as they have been and are in the corrupt societies
of the Old World. They threaten to reproduce here a state of things
often found elsewhere, in which the governmental machine, with its
allies and dependents, is capable of setting itself up against and
over the whole mass of unorganized citizens who follow the avocations
of private life. These classes completely possess the organization
of the Republican party. They have absorbed the Republican party.
They are, for all practical purposes, the Republican party. They make
its nominations; they shape its measures, they preserve its policy.
Individual dissenters who preserve the original traditions of American
free government there are, but their voices are not heard; they are
generally paralyzed; they are always powerless. Hitherto no Democratic
minority has been formed capable of exercising any practical power. No
internal remedy can come for a disease which has incorporated itself
with everything vital in the political body. It is too late to cut out
the cancer without killing the patient.
"In the nature of the case, the remedy can come only from an opposition
which shall grow strong enough to turn out the present existing
administration and take its place. In such an opposition the Democratic
masses must contribute a large element. They embrace three and a half
or four millions of votes, and are of themselves within five per cent.
of a majority. They contain nearly all the thinkers, speakers and
writers, all the trained statesmen who adhere to the traditions of
Jefferson; and while individual members have been not unstained with
the errors of the times, the body, as a whole, is sound; and a majority
is sure to declare for the ancient faith of Jefferson and Franklin and
George Clinton and Samuel and John Hancock.
"In the part I have borne in the administration of the Democratic party
of the State of New York--now closed--I have aimed at three things:
"1. To lead on public opinion in favor of the original ideas of the
Jeffersonian democracy and in support of such current measures as
secured valuable reforms.
"2. To terminate a degrading strife in which they enlisted themselves,
in comparing the leprous spots on their respective sides, and
practically declared that the word only was wanting to incite an
honorable emulation in which they should seek and apply effectual
remedies and the public mind stimulated to reform.
"3. To prepare the Democratic masses to act their part in a general
movement for reform in all the governmental institutions of the
country. (_Cætera desunt._)