pages back) that some remarkable developments which political life has
taken never crossed the minds of the authors of _The Federalist_, that
these wisest men of their time did not foresee what strike us to-day as
the specially characteristic virtues and faults of American democracy.
Neither the spoils system nor the system of party nominations by
wire-pullers crossed their minds. They did not foresee the inordinate
multiplication of elections, nor the evils of confining eligibility for
a seat in the legislature to a person resident in the electing district,
nor the disposition to ‘play down’ to the masses by seductive proposals.
That the power which money might come to exert lay quite out of their
view is not to be wondered at, for no large fortunes then existed. No
student of history will deem that these omissions detract from their
greatness, for history teaches nothing more plainly than the vanity of
predictions in the realm of what we call the moral and political
sciences, in religion, in ethics, in sociology, in government and
politics. Deep thinkers help us when they unfold those permanent truths
of human nature which come everywhere into play. Historians help us
when, by interpreting the past, they demonstrate what are the tendencies
that have gone to create the present. Observers keen enough to interpret
the underlying phenomena of their own time may help us by showing which
of the tendencies now at work are likely to become ruling factors in the
near future. But beyond the near future—that is to say, beyond the
lifetime of the generation which already holds power—no true philosopher
will venture. He may indulge his fancy in picturing the details of the
remoter landscape; but he knows that it is a region fit for fancy, not
for science. In the works of great thinkers there are to be found some
happy guesses about times to come; but these are few indeed, compared
with the prophecies whose worthlessness was so soon revealed that men
forgot they had ever been made, or the dreams which, like those of
Dante, idealized an impossible future from an irrevocable past.
As regards the views of Hamilton and Madison, who, be it remembered, do
not present themselves as prophets, but as the censors of present evils
which they are seeking to remedy, it may be added that the Constitution
which they framed and carried checked some of these very evils (_e.g._
the unjust law-making and reckless currency experiments of the State
legislatures); and that it was obviously impossible till the Federal
government had begun to work to say how the existing forces could adapt
themselves to it. Hamilton remarks in one of his letters that he holds
with Montesquieu that a nation’s form of government ought to be fitted
to it as a suit of clothes is fitted to its wearer[161]. He would
doubtless have added that one cannot make sure of the fit until the suit
has been tried on.
-----
Footnote 161:
‘I hold with Montesquieu that a government must be fitted to a nation
as much as a coat to the individual; and consequently that what may be
good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris and ridiculous at
Petersburgh.’ To Lafayette, Jan. 6, 1799.
-----
We must remember, moreover, that the causes which have affected the
political growth of America are largely causes which were in 1788
altogether beyond human ken. The cotton gin, Napoleon’s willingness to
sell Louisiana, steam communications by water and land, Irish and German
immigration, have swayed the course of that history; but even the first
of these factors had not risen over the horizon in that year, and the
last did not become potent till halfway through the nineteenth
century[162].
-----
Footnote 162:
The first cargo of cotton was sent from America to Europe in 1791, and
the cotton gin invented in 1793.
-----
What the sages of the Convention do show us are certain tendencies they
discern in their contemporaries, viz.:—
Recklessness and unwisdom in the masses, producing bad laws.
Unwillingness to submit to or support a strong government.
Abuse by the majority of its legal power over the minority.
Indifference to national as compared with local and sectional interests,
and consequent preference of State loyalty to national loyalty.
That each of these tendencies then existed, and might have been expected
to work for evil, admits of no doubt. But if we ask American history
what it has to say about their subsequent course, the answer will be
that the second and third tendencies have declined, and do not at
present menace the public welfare, while the first, though never absent
and always liable to marked recrudescence, as the annals of the several
States prove, has done comparatively little harm in the sphere of
national government. As to the fourth, which Hamilton seems to have
chiefly feared, it ultimately took the form, not of a general
centrifugal force, impelling each State to fly off from the system, but
of a scheme for the separation of the Southern or slave-holding States
into a separate Confederacy, and in this form it received, in 1865, a
crushing and apparently final defeat[163].
-----
Footnote 163:
When we come to Tocqueville, we shall find him touching but lightly on
the two first of the above tendencies (partly, perhaps, because he
attends too little to the State governments), but emphasizing the
third and fearing from the fourth the dissolution of the Union.
-----
IV. TOCQUEVILLE AND HIS BOOK.
Fifty-one years after the recognition of the independence of the United
States, sixty-seven years before the beginning of the twentieth century,
Alexis de Tocqueville published his _Democracy in America_, one of the
few treatises on the philosophy of politics which has risen to the rank
of a classic. His book, therefore, stands rather further than halfway
back between our own days and those first days of the Republic which we
know from the writings of the Fathers, of Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
Hamilton, Madison. It offers a means of measuring the changes that had
passed on the country during the half-century from the birth of the
Union to the visit of its most famous European critic, and again from
the days of that critic to our own.
It is a classic, and because it is a classic, one may venture to canvas
it freely without the fear of seeming to detract from the fame of its
author. The more one reads Tocqueville, the more admiration does one
feel for the acuteness of his observation, for the delicacy of his
analysis, for the elegant precision of his reasonings, for the limpid
purity of his style; above all, for his love of truth and the elevation
of his character. He is not only urbane, but judicial; not only noble,
but edifying. There is perhaps no book of the generation to which he
belonged which contains more solid wisdom in a more attractive dress.
We have here, however, to regard the treatise, not as a model of art and
a storehouse of ethical maxims, but as a picture and criticism of the
government and people of the United States. And before using it as
evidence of their condition seventy years ago, we must appraise the
reliance to be placed upon it[164].
-----
Footnote 164:
Some interesting remarks upon Tocqueville’s tour in America and upon
his views of American affairs may be found in President Gilman’s
Introduction to a recent edition (1898) of the English translation of
Tocqueville’s book.
-----
First let it be observed that not only are Tocqueville’s descriptions of
democracy as displayed in America no longer true in many points, but
that in certain points they never were true. That is to say, some were
true of America, but not of democracy in general, while others were true
of democracy in general, but not true of America. It is worth while to
attempt to indicate the causes of such errors as may be discovered in
his picture, because they are errors which every one who approaches a
similar task has to guard against. Tocqueville is not widely read in the
United States, where the scientific, historical, and philosophical study
of the institutions of the country, apart from the legal study of the
Constitution, is of comparatively recent growth. He is less read than
formerly in England and even in France. But his views of the American
government and people have so passed into the texture of our thoughts
that we cannot shake off his influence, and, in order to profit by it,
are bound to submit his conclusions and predictions to a searching
though always respectful examination.
The defects of the book are due to three causes. He had a strong and
penetrating intellect, but it moved by preference in the _a priori_ or
deductive path, and his power of observation, quick and active as it
was, did not lead but followed the march of his reasonings. It will be
found, when his method is closely scrutinized, that the facts he cites
are rather the illustrations than the sources of his conclusions. He had
studied America carefully and thoroughly. But he wanted the necessary
preparation for that study. His knowledge of England, while remarkable
in a native of continental Europe, was not sufficient to show him how
much in American institutions is really English, and explainable only
from English sources.
He wrote about America, and meant to describe it fully and faithfully.
But his heart was in France, and the thought of France, never absent
from him, unconsciously coloured every picture he drew. It made him
think things abnormal which are merely un-French; it made him attach
undue importance to phenomena which seemed to explain French events or
supply a warning against French dangers.
He reveals his method in the introduction to his book. He draws a fancy
sketch of a democratic people, based on a few general principles, passes
to the condition of France, and then proceeds to tell us that in America
he went to seek the type of democracy—democracy pure and simple—in its
normal shape.
‘J’avoue que dans l’Amérique, j’ai vu plus que l’Amérique; j’y ai
cherché une image de la démocratie elle-même, de ses penchants, de son
caractère, de ses préjugés, de ses passions.’
Like Plato in the _Republic_, he begins by imagining that there exists
somewhere a type or pattern of democracy, and as the American Republic
comes nearest to this pattern, he selects it for examination. He is
aware, of course, that there must be in every country and people many
features special to the country which reappear in its government, and
repeatedly observes that this or that is peculiar to America, and must
not be taken as necessarily or generally true of other democracies. But
in practice he underrates the purely local and special features of
America, and often, forgetting his own scientific cautions, treats it as
a norm for democracy in general. Nor does he, after finding his norm,
proceed simply to examine the facts and draw inferences from them. In
many chapters he begins by laying down one or two large principles, he
develops conclusions from them, and then he points out that the
phenomena of America conform to these conclusions. Instead of drawing
the character of democracy from the aspects it presents in America, he
arrives at its character by a sort of intuitive method, and uses those
aspects only to point and enforce propositions he has already reached.
It is not democracy in America he describes, but his own theoretic view
of democracy illustrated from America. He is admirably honest, never
concealing or consciously evading a fact which he perceives to tell
against his theories. But being already prepossessed by certain abstract
principles, facts do not fall on his mind like seeds on virgin soil. He
is struck by those which accord with, he is apt to ignore those which
diverge from, his preconceptions. Like all deductive reasoners, he is
peculiarly exposed to the danger of pressing a principle too far, of
seeking to explain a phenomenon by one principle only when it is perhaps
the result of an accidental concurrence of several minor causes. The
scholasticism we observe in him is due partly to this deductive habit,
partly to his want of familiarity with the actualities of politics. An
instance of it appears in his tendency to over-estimate the value of
constitutional powers and devices, and to forget how often they are
modified, almost reversed, in practice by the habits of those who use
them. Though no one has more judiciously warned us to look to the actual
working of institutions and the ideas of the men who work them rather
than to their letter, he has himself failed to observe that the American
Constitution tends to vary in working from its legal theory, and the
name Legislature has prevented him, like so many other foreign
observers, from seeing in the English Parliament an executive as well as
a law-making body.
In saying that he did not know England, I fully admit that his knowledge
of that country and its free government was far beyond the knowledge of
most cultivated foreigners. He had studied its history, and had gathered
from his reading the sentiments of its aristocracy and of its literary
men. But he did not know the ideas and habits of the English middle
class, with whom the Americans of his time might better have been
compared, and he was not familiar—as how could a stranger be?—with the
details of English politics and the working of the English judicial
system. Hence he has failed to grasp the substantial identity of the
American people with the English. He perceives that there are many and
close resemblances, and traces much that is American to an English
source. He has seen and described with perfect justness and clearness
the mental habits of the English and American lawyer as contrasted with
those of the French lawyer. But he has not grasped, as perhaps no one
but an Englishman or an American can grasp, the truth that the American
people of 1830 was a branch of the English people, modified in some
directions by the circumstances of its colonial life and its more
popular government, but in essentials the same. Hence much that was
merely English appeared to Tocqueville to be American or democratic. The
functions of the judges, for instance, in expounding the Constitution
(whether of the Federation or of a State) and disregarding a statute
which conflicts therewith, the responsibility of an official to the
ordinary courts of the land, the co-existence of laws of a higher and
lower degree of authority, seem to him to be novel and brilliant
inventions instead of mere instances of general doctrines of English
law, adapted to the circumstances of a colony dependent on a home
Government, or of a State partially subordinated to a Federal
Government. The absence of what the French call ‘Administration,’ and
the disposition to leave people to themselves, which strike him, would
not surprise an Englishman accustomed to the like freedom. Much that he
remarks in the mental habits of the ordinary American, his latent
conservatism for instance, his indifference to amusement as compared
with material comfort, his commercial eagerness and tendency to take a
commercial view of all things, might have been just as well remarked of
the ordinary middle-class Englishman, and had nothing to do with a
democratic government. Other features, which he ascribes to this
last-named cause, such as habits of easy social intercourse, the
disposition to prize certain particular virtues, the readiness to give
mutual help, are equally attributable to the conditions of life that
existed among settlers in a wild country where few persons were raised
by birth or wealth above their fellows, and every one had need of the
aid of others—conditions whose results remained in the temper of the
people even when the community had passed into another phase, a phase in
which inequalities of wealth were already marked, and temptations had
begun to appear which did not beset the Puritans of the seventeenth
century.
It is no reproach to this great author that France formed to him the
background of every picture whose foreground was the New World. He tells
us frankly in the Introduction that the phenomena of social equality, as
they existed in France, and the political consequences to be expected
from them, filled his mind when he examined the institutions of America;
he hoped to find there lessons by which France might profit: ‘J’ai voulu
y trouver des enseignements dont nous puissions profiter.’ But with this
purpose before him, he could hardly avoid laying too much stress on
points which seemed to have instruction for his own countrymen, and from
fancying those things to be abnormal, or at least specially noteworthy,
which stood contrasted with the circumstances of France. Tocqueville is,
among eminent French writers, one of the least prone to assume the ways
and ideas of his own country to be the rule, and those of another
country the exception; yet even in him the tendency lurks. There is more
than a trace of it in his surprise at the American habit of using
without abusing political associations, and at the disposition of
Legislatures to try experiments in legislation, a disposition which
struck him chiefly by its contrast with the immutability which the Code
of the First Empire seemed to have stamped upon the private law of
France.
His constant reference to France goes deeper than the method of the
book. It determines his scope and aim. The _Democracy in America_ is not
so much a political study as a work of edification. It is a warning to
France of the need to adjust her political institutions to her social
condition, and above all to improve the tone of her politics, to create
a moral and religious basis for her national life, to erect a new fabric
of social doctrine, in the place of that which, already crumbling, the
Revolution had overthrown. We must not, therefore, expect to find in him
a complete description and criticism, such as a German would have given,
of the government of America in all its details and aspects. To note
this is not to complain of the book. What Tocqueville has produced is
more artistic, and possibly more impressive than such a description
would have been, as a landscape gives a juster notion of scenery than a
map. His book is permanently valuable, because its reflections and
exhortations are applicable not merely to the Frenchmen of sixty-five
years ago, but to mankind generally, since they touch upon failings and
dangers permanently inherent in political society. Let it only be
remembered that, in spite of its scientific form, it is really a work of
art quite as much as a work of science, and a work suffused with strong,
though carefully repressed, emotion.
The best illustration I can give of these tendencies in our author will
be found in a comparison of the first part of the book, published in
1834, and now included in the first and second volumes of recent
editions, with the second part published in 1840, and now forming the
third volume. In the first part the author keeps near his facts. Even
when he has set out on the _a priori_ road he presently brings his
theory into relation with American phenomena: they give substance to,
and (so to speak) steady the theory, while the theory connects and
illumines them. But in the second part (third volume) he soars far from
the ground, and is often lost in the clouds of his own sombre
meditation. When this part was written, the direct impressions of his
transatlantic visit had begun to fade from his mind. With all his
finesse and fertility, he had neither sufficient profundity of thought,
nor a sufficient ample store of facts gathered from history at large, to
enable him to give body and substance to his reflections on the obscure
problems wherewith he attempts to deal[165]. Hence, this part of the
book is not so much a study of American democracy as a series of
ingenious and finespun abstract speculations on the features of equality
and its results on modern society and thought, speculations which,
though they have been singled out for admiration by some high judges,
such as Ampère and Laboulaye, will appear to most readers overfanciful,
overconfident in their effort to construct a general theory applicable
to the infinitely diversified facts of human society, and occasionally
monotonous in their repetition of distinctions without differences and
generalities too vague, perhaps too hollow, for practical use.
-----
Footnote 165:
Sainte-Beuve remarks of him, ‘Il a commencé à penser avant d’avoir
rien appris: ce qui fait qu’il a quelquefois pensé creux.’ Thiers once
said, in the Chamber, ‘Quand je considère intuitivement, comme dirait
M. de Tocqueville.’
-----
How far do these defects of Tocqueville’s work affect its value for our
present purpose, that of discovering from it what was the condition,
political, social, intellectual, of the United States in 1833, and what
the forces that were then at work in determining the march of the nation
and the development of its institutions?
It is but slightly that they impair its worth as a record of facts.
Tocqueville is so careful and so unprejudiced an observer that I doubt
if there be a single remark of his which can be dismissed as either
erroneous or superficial. There is always some basis for every statement
he makes. But the basis is occasionally too small for the superstructure
of inference, speculation, and prediction which he rears upon it. To
borrow an illustration from chemistry, his analysis is always right so
far as it is qualitative, sometimes wrong where it attempts to be
quantitative. The fact is there, but it is perhaps a smaller fact than
he thinks, or a transient fact, or a fact whose importance is, or
shortly will be, diminished by other facts which he has not adequately
recognized.
When we pass from description to argument he is a less safe guide. By
the light of subsequent experience we can perceive that he mistook
transitory for permanent causes. Many of the phenomena which he ascribes
to democracy were due only to the fact that large fortunes had not yet
grown up in America, others to the absence, in most parts of the
country, of that higher education and culture which comes with wealth,
leisure, and the settlement of society. I have already observed that he
sometimes supposes features of American politics to be novel and
democratic which are really old and English; that he does not allow
sufficiently for the imprint which colonial life had left on the habits
and ideas of the people, an imprint which, though it tends to wear off
with time, is yet also modified into something which, while you may call
it democratic, remains different from the democracy of an old European
country, and is not an index to the character of democracy in general.
It need hardly be said that the worth of a book like his is not to be
measured by the number of flaws which can be discovered under the
critic’s microscope. Even a sovereign genius like Aristotle cannot be
expected to foresee which of the influences he discerns will retain
their potency: it is enough if his view is more piercing and more
comprehensive than that of his greatest contemporaries, if his record
shows the high-water mark of the learning and philosophy of the time.
Had history falsified far more of Tocqueville’s predictions than she has
done, his work would still remain eminently suggestive and stimulating.
And it is edificatory not merely because it contains precepts instinct
with the loftiest morality. It is a model of that spirit of fairness and
justice, that love of pure truth which is conspicuously necessary, and
not less conspicuously difficult, in the discussion, even the abstract
discussion, of the problems of political philosophy. Few books inspire a
higher respect for their writer.
V. TOCQUEVILLE’S VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES.
Before we examine the picture of the social and political phenomena of
America which Tocqueville has drawn, let us see what were the chief
changes that had passed on the territory of the Union, on its material
resources, on the habits and ideas of the people, during the forty-six
years that elapsed from the publication of the _Federalist_ to that of
the _Démocratie en Amérique_.