sovereignty in a unitary state, what shall we say of a federal state?
How apply our analysis to that? One is tempted to declare, with Dr.
Merkel, of Strassburg, that federal states give direct contradiction
of fact to prevailing theories respecting the necessity for unity
of power, indivisibility of sovereignty. Here, as he says, we have
organs and authorities in possession of powers exclusively their own,
for the furtherance of functions necessary to the ends of the state
as a whole, existing side by side with organs also in full possession
of powers exclusively their own, for the furtherance of the local
and special functions of the member states. We know, moreover, that
these two sets of organs are in fact co-ordinate; that the powers of
the states were not derived from the federal authority, were even
antecedent to the powers of the federal government, and historically
quite independent of them. And yet no one who ponders either the life
or the formal structure of a federal state can fail to perceive that
there is, after all, an essential unity in it, the virtual creation of
a central sovereignty. The constituent act--the manner in which the
government was created--can, I conceive, have nothing to do with our
analysis in this matter. The way in which the federal state came into
existence is immaterial to the question of sovereignty within it after
it has been created. Originative life and action, the characteristic
attributes of sovereignty, come after that. Character and choice are
postponed to birth, sovereignty to the creation of the body politic.
The constituent act creates a thing capable of exercising sovereignty.
After the creative law has done its part, by whatever process, then the
functions of independent life begin. Thereafter, in all federal states,
even the amendment of the fundamental law becomes an organic act,
depending, practically without exception, upon the initiative of the
chief originative organ of the federal state. Confederations are here
out of the question. They are, of course, associations of sovereigns.
In the federal state self-determination with respect to their law as
a whole has been lost by the member states. They cannot extend, they
cannot even determine, their own powers conclusively without appeal to
the federal authorities. They are unquestionably subject to a political
superior. They are fused, subordinated, dominated. Though they do not
exercise their powers by virtue of delegation, though their powers are
indeed inherent and in a very important sense independent, they are
yet inferior to a body whose own powers are in reality self-determined,
however much that self-determination may be hedged about and clogged
by the forms of the fundamental federal law. They are still states,
because their powers are original and inherent, not derivative; because
their political rights are not also legal duties; and because they
can apply to their commands the full imperative sanctions of law.
But their sphere is limited by the presiding and sovereign powers
of a state superordinated to them, the extent of whose authority is
determined, under constitutional forms and guarantees, by itself. They
have dominion; but it has sovereignty. For with the federal state lie
the highest powers of originative legal determination, the ultimate
authority to warrant change and sanction jurisdiction.
Our thought is embarrassed throughout such an analysis by the very
fact which invalidates the Austinian conception and makes a fresh
analysis necessary. Very little law literally originates in command,
though its formulation and enforcement must unquestionably be effected
through the commanding authorities of the state. It is their function
to direct, to lead, rather than to command. They originate forms,
but they do not discover principles. In a very profound sense law
proceeds from the community. It is the result of its undeliberate
as well as of its deliberate developments, of its struggles, class
against class, interest against interest, and of its compromises and
adjustments of opinion. It follows, slowly, its ethical judgments, more
promptly its material necessities. But law issues thus from the body
of the community only in vague and inchoate form. It must be taken
out of the sphere of voluntary and uncertain action and made precise
and invariable. It becomes positive law by receiving definition and
being backed by an active and recognized power within the state. The
sovereign organ of a state is, therefore, very properly said to be
its law-_making_ organ. It transmutes selected tendencies into stiff
and urgent rules. It exercises a sovereign choice in so doing. It
determines which tendencies shall be accepted, which checked and denied
efficacy. It forms the purposes of the state, avoiding revolution if
it form them wisely and with a true insight. This is sovereignty:--to
sit at the helm and steer, marking out such free courses for the
stanch craft as wind and weather will permit. This is the only sort of
sovereignty that can be exercised in human affairs. But the pilot is
sovereign, and not the weather.
IV
CHARACTER OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES
Everything apprises us of the fact that we are not the same nation
now that we were when the government was formed. In looking back to
that time, the impression is inevitable that we started with sundry
wrong ideas about ourselves. We deemed ourselves rank democrats,
whereas we were in fact only progressive Englishmen. Turn the leaves
of that sage manual of constitutional interpretation and advocacy, the
_Federalist_, and note the perverse tendency of its writers to refer
to Greece and Rome for precedents,--that Greece and Rome which haunted
all our earlier and even some of our more mature years. Recall, too,
that familiar story of Daniel Webster which tells of his coming home
exhausted from an interview with the first President-elect Harrison,
whose Secretary of State he was to be, and explaining that he had been
obliged in the course of the conference, which concerned the inaugural
address about to be delivered, to kill nine Roman consuls whom it had
been the intention of the good conqueror of Tippecanoe publicly to take
into office with him. The truth is that we long imagined ourselves
related in some unexplained way to all ancient republicans. Strangely
enough, too, we at the same time accepted the quite incompatible theory
that we were related also to the French philosophical radicals. We
claimed kinship with democrats everywhere,--with all democrats. We can
now scarcely realize the atmosphere of such thoughts. We are no longer
wont to refer to the ancients or to the French for sanction of what we
do. We have had abundant experience of our own by which to reckon.
“Hardly any fact in history,” says Mr. Bagehot, writing about the
middle of the century, “is so incredible as that forty and a few
years ago England was ruled by Mr. Perceval. It seems almost the same
as being ruled by the _Record_ newspaper.” (Mr. Bagehot would now
probably say the _Standard_ newspaper.) “He had the same poorness
of thought, the same petty conservatism, the same dark and narrow
superstition.” “The mere fact of such a premier being endured shows
how deeply the whole national spirit and interest was absorbed in the
contest with Napoleon, how little we understood the sort of man who
should regulate its conduct,--‘in the crisis of Europe,’ as Sydney
Smith said, ‘he safely brought the Curates’ Salaries Improvement Bill
to a hearing;’ and it still more shows the horror of all innovation
which the recent events of French history had impressed on our wealthy
and comfortable classes. They were afraid of catching revolution, as
old women of catching cold. Sir Archibald Alison to this day holds that
revolution is an infectious disease, beginning no one knows how, and
going on no one knows where. There is but one rule of escape, explains
the great historian: ‘Stay still; don’t move; do what you have been
accustomed to do; and consult your grandmother on everything.’”
Almost equally incredible to us is the ardor of revolution that filled
the world in those first days of our national life,--the fact that one
of the rulers of the world’s mind in that generation was Rousseau, the
apostle of all that is fanciful, unreal, and misleading in politics.
To be ruled by him was like taking an account of life from Mr. Rider
Haggard. And yet there is still much sympathy in this timid world
for the dull people who felt safe in the hands of Mr. Perceval, and,
happily, much sympathy also, though little justification, for such as
caught a generous elevation of spirit from the speculative enthusiasm
of Rousseau.
For us who stand in the dusty matter-of-fact world of to-day, there
is a touch of pathos in recollections of the ardor for democratic
liberty that filled the air of Europe and America a century ago with
such quickening influences. We may sometimes catch ourselves regretting
that the inoculations of experience have closed our systems against the
infections of hopeful revolution.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress, to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.”
Such was the inspiration which not Wordsworth alone, but Coleridge
also, and many another generous spirit whom we love, caught in that day
of hope.
It is common to say, in explanation of our regret that the dawn and
youth of democracy’s day are past, that our principles are cooler now
and more circumspect, with the coolness and circumspection of advanced
years. It seems to some that our enthusiasms have become tamer and
more decorous because our sinews have hardened; that as experience
has grown idealism has declined. But to speak thus is to speak with
the old self-deception as to the character of our politics. If we are
suffering disappointment, it is the disappointment of an awakening:
we were dreaming. For we never had any business hearkening to Rousseau
or consorting with Europe in revolutionary sentiment. The government
which we founded one hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in
advanced democracy, as we allowed Europe and even ourselves to suppose;
it was simply an adaptation of English constitutional government. If
we suffered Europe to study our institutions as instances in point
touching experimentation in politics, she was the more deceived. If
we began the first century of our national existence under a similar
impression ourselves, there is the greater reason why we should start
out upon a new century of national life with more accurate conceptions.
To this end it is important that the following, among other things,
should be kept prominently in mind:--
(1.) That there are certain influences astir in this century which
make for democracy the world over, and that these influences owe their
origin in part to the radical thought of the last century; but that it
was not such forces that made us democratic, nor are we responsible
for them.
(2.) That, so far from owing our governments to these general
influences, we began, not by carrying out any theory, but by simply
carrying out a history,--inventing nothing, only establishing a
specialized species of English government; that we founded, not
democracy, but constitutional government in America.
(3.) That the government which we thus set up in a perfectly normal
manner has nevertheless changed greatly under our hands, by reason both
of growth and of the operation of the general democratic forces,--the
European, or rather worldwide, democratic forces of which I have spoken.
(4.) That two things, the great size to which our governmental organism
has attained, and, still more, this recent exposure of its character
and purposes to the common democratic forces of the age of steam and
electricity, have created new problems of organization, which it
behooves us to meet in the old spirit, but with new measures.
I.
First, then, for the forces which are bringing in democratic temper
and method the world over. It is matter of familiar knowledge what
these forces are, but it will be profitable to our thought to pass them
once more in review. They are freedom of thought and the diffusion of
enlightenment among the people. Steam and electricity have co-operated
with systematic popular education to accomplish this diffusion. The
progress of popular education and the progress of democracy have been
inseparable. The publication of their great encyclopædia by Diderot and
his associates in France in the last century, was the sure sign of the
change that was setting in. Learning was turning its face away from the
studious few towards the curious many. The intellectual movement of the
modern time was emerging from the narrow courses of scholastic thought,
and beginning to spread itself abroad over the extended, if shallow,
levels of the common mind. The serious forces of democracy will be
found, upon analysis, to reside, not in the disturbing doctrines of
eloquent revolutionary writers, not in the turbulent discontent of
the pauperized and oppressed, so much as in the educational forces of
the last hundred and fifty years, which have elevated the masses in
many countries to a plane of understanding and of orderly, intelligent
purpose more nearly on a level with the average man of the classes that
have hitherto been permitted to govern. The movements towards democracy
which have mastered all the other political tendencies of our day are
not older than the middle of the last century; and that is just the age
of the now ascendant movement toward systematic popular education.
Yet organized popular education is only one of the quickening
influences that have been producing the general enlightenment which
is everywhere becoming the promise of general liberty. Rather, it is
only part of a great whole, vastly larger than itself. Schools are but
separated seed-beds, in which the staple thoughts of the steady and
stay-at-home people are prepared and nursed. Not much of the world,
moreover, goes to school in the school house. But through the mighty
influences of commerce and the press the world itself has become a
school. The air is alive with the multitudinous voices of information.
Steady trade winds of intercommunication have sprung up which carry the
seeds of education and enlightenment, wheresoever planted, to every
quarter of the globe. No scrap of new thought can escape being borne
away from its place of birth by these all-absorbing currents. No idea
can be kept exclusively at home, but is taken up by the trader, the
reporter, the traveller, the missionary, the explorer, and is given to
all the world, in the newspaper, the novel, the memoir, the poem, the
treatise, till every community may know, not only itself, but all the
world as well, for the small price of learning to read and keeping its
ears open. All the world, so far as its news and its most insistent
thoughts are concerned, is fast being made every man’s neighbor.
Carlyle unquestionably touched one of the obvious truths concerning
modern democracy when he declared it to be the result of printing. In
the newspaper press a whole population is made critic of all human
affairs; democracy is “virtually extant,” and “democracy virtually
extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.” Looked at in the
large, the newspaper press is a type of democracy, bringing all men
without distinction under comment made by any man without distinction;
every topic is reduced to a common standard of news; everything is
noted and argued about by everybody. Nothing could give surer promise
of popular power than the activity and alertness of thought which are
made through such agencies to accompany the training of the public
schools. The activity may often be misdirected or unwholesome, may
sometimes be only feverish and mischievous, a grievous product of
narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it is none the less a
stirring and potent activity. It at least marks the initial stages of
effective thought. It makes men conscious of the existence and interest
of affairs lying outside the dull round of their own daily lives. It
gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods, to look upon and think
about. They catch glimpses of the international connections of their
trades, of the universal application of law, of the endless variety
of life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with men like
themselves, and yet full of strange customs, puzzled by dim omens,
stained by crime, ringing with voices familiar and unfamiliar.
And all this a man can nowadays get without stirring from home, by
merely spelling out the print that covers every piece of paper about
him. If men are thrown, for any reason, into the swift and easy
currents of travel, they find themselves brought daily face to face
with persons native of every clime, with practices suggestive of whole
histories, with a thousand things which challenge curiosity, inevitably
provoking inquiries such as enlarge knowledge of life and shake the
mind imperatively loose from old preconceptions.
These are the forces which have established the drift towards
democracy. When all sources of information are accessible to all men
alike, when the world’s thought and the world’s news are scattered
broadcast where the poorest may find them, the non-democratic forms
of government must find life a desperate venture. Exclusive privilege
needs privacy, but cannot have it. Kingship of the elder patterns needs
sanctity, but can find it nowhere obtainable in a world of news items
and satisfied curiosity. The many will no longer receive submissively
the thought of a ruling few, but insist upon having opinions of their
own. The reaches of public opinion have been infinitely extended; the
number of voices that must be heeded in legislation and in executive
policy has been infinitely multiplied. Modern influences have inclined
every man to clear his throat for a word in the world’s debates. They
have popularized everything they have touched.
In the newspapers, it is true, there is very little concert between the
writers; little but piecemeal opinion is created by their comment and
argument; there is no common voice amidst their counsellings. But the
aggregate voice thunders with tremendous volume; and that aggregate
voice is ‘public opinion.’ Popular education and cheap printing and
travel vastly thicken the ranks of thinkers everywhere that their
influence is felt, and by rousing the multitude to take knowledge of
the affairs of government prepare the time when the multitude will, so
far as possible, take charge of the affairs of government,--the time
when, to repeat Carlyle’s phrase, democracy will become palpably extant.
But, mighty as such forces are, democratic as they are, no one can fail
to perceive that they are inadequate to produce of themselves such a
government as ours. There is little in them of constructive efficacy.
They could not of themselves build any government at all. They are
critical, analytical, questioning, quizzing forces; not architectural,
not powers that devise and build. The influences of popular education,
of the press, of travel, of commerce, of the innumerable agencies which
nowadays send knowledge and thought in quick pulsations through every
part and member of society, do not necessarily mould men for effective
endeavor. They may only confuse and paralyze the mind with their myriad
stinging lashes of excitement. They may only strengthen the impression
that “the world’s a stage,” and that no one need do more than sit
and look on through his ready glass, the newspaper. They overwhelm
one with impressions, but do they give stalwartness to his manhood?
Do they make his hand any steadier on the plough, or his purpose any
clearer with reference to the duties of the moment? They stream light
about him, it may be, but do they clear his vision? Is he better able
to see because they give him countless things to look at? Is he better
able to judge because they fill him with a delusive sense of knowing
everything? Activity of mind is not necessarily strength of mind. It
may manifest itself in mere dumb show; it may run into jigs as well as
into strenuous work at noble tasks. A man’s farm does not yield its
fruits the more abundantly in their season because he reads the world’s
news in the papers. A merchant’s shipments do not multiply because he
studies history. Banking is none the less hazardous to the banker’s
capital and taxing to his powers because the best writing of the best
essayists is to be bought cheap.
II.
Very different were the forces behind us. Nothing establishes the
republican state save trained capacity for self-government, practical
aptitude for public affairs, habitual soberness and temperateness
of united action. When we look back to the moderate sagacity and
steadfast, self-contained habit in self-government of the men to whom
we owe the establishment of our institutions in the United States,
we are at once made aware that there is no communion between their
democracy and the radical thought and restless spirit called by that
name in Europe. There is almost nothing in common between popular
outbreaks such as took place in France at her great Revolution and
the establishment of a government like our own. Our memories of the
year 1789 are as far as possible removed from the memories which
Europe retains of that pregnant year. We manifested one hundred
years ago what Europe lost, namely, self-command, self-possession.
Democracy in Europe, outside of closeted Switzerland, has acted always
in rebellion, as a destructive force: it can scarcely be said to
have had, even yet, any period of organic development. It has built
such temporary governments as it has had opportunity to erect on the
old foundations and out of the discredited materials of centralized
rule, elevating the people’s representatives for a season to the
throne, but securing almost as little as ever of that every-day local
self-government which lies so near to the heart of liberty. Democracy
in America, on the other hand, and in the English colonies has had,
almost from the first, a truly organic growth. There was nothing
revolutionary in its movements; it had not to overthrow other polities;
it had only to organize itself. It had not to create, but only to
expand, self-government. It did not need to spread propaganda: it
needed nothing but to methodize its ways of living.
In brief, we were doing nothing essentially new a century ago. Our
strength and our facility alike inhered in our traditions; those
traditions made our character and shaped our institutions. Liberty
is not something that can be created by a document; neither is it
something which, when created, can be laid away in a document, a
completed work. It is an organic principle,--a principle of life,
renewing and being renewed. Democratic institutions are never done;
they are like living tissue, always a-making. It is a strenuous thing,
this of living the life of a free people; and our success in it depends
upon training, not upon clever invention.
Our democracy, plainly, was not a body of doctrine; it was a stage of
development. Our democratic state was not a piece of developed theory,
but a piece of developed habit. It was not created by mere aspirations
or by new faith; it was built up by slow custom. Its process was
experience, its basis old wont, its meaning national organic oneness
and effective life. It came, like manhood, as the fruit of youth. An
immature people could not have had it, and the maturity to which it
was vouchsafed was the maturity of freedom and self-control. Such
government as ours is a form of conduct, and its only stable foundation
is character. A particular form of government may no more be adopted
than a particular type of character maybe adopted: both institutions
and character must be developed by conscious effort and through
transmitted aptitudes.
Governments such as ours are founded upon discussion, and government
by discussion comes as late in political as scientific thought in
intellectual development. It is a habit of state life created by
long-established circumstance, and is possible for a nation only in the
adult age of its political life. The people who successfully maintain
such a government must have gone through a period of political training
which shall have prepared them by gradual steps of acquired privilege
for assuming the entire control of their affairs. Long and slowly
widening experience in local self-direction must have prepared them for
national self-direction. They must have acquired adult self-reliance,
self-knowledge, and self-control, adult soberness and deliberateness of
judgment, adult sagacity in self-government, adult vigilance of thought
and quickness of insight. When practised, not by small communities, but
by wide nations, democracy, far from being a crude form of government,
is possible only amongst peoples of the highest and steadiest political
habit. It is the heritage of races purged alike of hasty barbaric
passions and of patient servility to rulers, and schooled in temperate
common counsel. It is an institution of political noonday, not of the
half-light of political dawn. It can never be made to sit easily or
safely on first generations, but strengthens through long heredity. It
is poison to the infant, but tonic to the man. Monarchies may be made,
but democracies must grow.