Fifty Years Ago the Great English Historian
Saw Dangers Ahead for the
American Ship of State.
Macaulay, the historian, wrote a striking letter in 1857 to H.S. Randall,
of New York, who had sent to the author of the "History of England" a
"Life of Jefferson."
The occasion seemed to Macaulay suitable for an expression of his opinion
of American institutions. Accordingly he wrote at length. The Boston
_Transcript_ recently published the letter, which, in its essential parts,
is as follows:
I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or
civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is
dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost
instantaneous.
What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure
democracy was established there. During a short time there
was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national
bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of
prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the
purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.
Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as
poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians.
Happily, the danger was averted; and now there is a
despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is
gone, but civilization has been saved. You may think that
your country enjoys an exemption from these evils; I will
frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion.
Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by
a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of
fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will
be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old
World; and while that is the case the Jefferson politics may
continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.
An Early Victorian Mother Shipton.
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly
settled as Old England. Wages will be as low, and will
fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your
Manchesters and Birminghams; and in those Manchesters and
Birminghams hundreds and thousands of artisans will
sometimes be out of work.
Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.
Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and
discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to
agitators, who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that
one man should have a million while another cannot get a
full meal.
In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and
sometimes a little rioting; but it matters little, for here
the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in
the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select--of an
educated class--of a class which is, and knows itself to be,
deeply interested in the security of property and the
maintenance of order.
Restraining the Discontented Majority.
Accordingly the malcontents are gently but firmly
restrained. The bad time is got over without robbing the
wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national
prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful,
wages rise, and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness.
I have seen England pass, three or four times, through such
critical seasons as I have described. Through such seasons
the United States will have to pass in the course of the
next century, if not of this. How will you pass through
them? I heartily wish you good deliverance; but my reason
and my wishes are at war, and I cannot help foreboding the
worst.
It is quite plain that your government will never be able to
restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For, with
you, the majority is the government, and has the rich, who
are always in the minority, absolutely at its mercy.
The day will come when, in the State of New York, a
multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a
breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will
choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a
Legislature will be chosen?
Statesman and Demagogue.
On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for
vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the
other is a demagogue, ranting about the tyranny of the
capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be
permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while
thousands of honest folk are in want of necessaries.
Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a
workman who hears his children cry for bread?
I seriously apprehend you will, in some such season of
adversity as I have described, do things that will prevent
prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who
should, in a season of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn,
and thus make the next year not one of scarcity, but of
absolute famine.
There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will
increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh
spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution
is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society
has entered on its downward progress, either civilization or
liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will
seize the reins of government with a strong hand or your
republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was
in the fifth.
Curious that Macaulay's fears for America should not have been felt by
Americans themselves until now. Even to-day, when in some degree the
symptoms he described a half century ago are making their appearance, the
American people is more interested in the situation than alarmed by it;
for the Americans, like the English, rely with confidence upon the
Anglo-Saxon genius for working things out.