called to mind, that only in the United States, in a few other
governments begotten of the English race, and in Switzerland, where
old Teutonic habit has had the same persistency as in England, have
examples yet been furnished of successful democracy of the modern type.
England herself is close upon democracy. Her backwardness in entering
upon its full practice is no less instructive as to the conditions
prerequisite to democracy than is the forwardness of her offspring.
She sent out to all her colonies which escaped the luckless beginning
of being made penal settlements, comparatively small, homogeneous
populations of pioneers, with strong instincts of self-government, and
with no social materials out of which to build government otherwise
than democratically. She herself, meanwhile, retained masses of
population never habituated to participation in government, untaught in
political principle either by the teachers of the hustings or of the
school house. She has had to approach democracy, therefore, by slow
and cautious extensions of the franchise to those prepared for it;
while her better colonies, born into democracy, have had to receive all
comers within their pale. She has been paring down exclusive privileges
and levelling classes; the colonies have from the first been asylums of
civil equality. They have assimilated new while she has prepared old
populations.
Erroneous as it is to represent government as only a commonplace
sort of business, little elevated in method above merchandising, and
to be regulated by counting-house principles, the favor easily won
for such views among our own people is very significant. It means
self-reliance in government. It gives voice to the eminently modern
democratic feeling that government is no hidden cult, to be left to a
few specially prepared individuals, but a common, every-day concern of
life, even if the biggest such concern. It is this self-confidence, in
many cases mistaken, no doubt, which is gradually spreading among other
peoples, less justified in it than are our own.
One cannot help marvelling that facts so obvious as these should have
escaped the perception of some of the sagest thinkers and most thorough
historical scholars of our day. Yet so it is. Sir Henry Maine, even,
the great interpreter to Englishmen of the historical forces operative
in law and social institutions, has utterly failed, in his plausible
work on _Popular Government_, to distinguish the democracy, or rather
the popular government, of the English race, which is bred by slow
circumstance and founded upon habit, from the democracy of other
peoples, which is bred by discontent and founded upon revolution.
He has missed that most obvious teaching of events, that successful
democracy differs from unsuccessful in being a product of history,--a
product of forces not suddenly become operative, but slowly working
upon whole peoples for generations together. The level of democracy is
the level of every-day habit, the level of common national experiences,
and lies far below the elevations of ecstasy to which the revolutionist
climbs.
III.
While there can be no doubt about the derivation of our government from
habit rather than from doctrine, from English experience rather than
from European thought; while it is evident that our institutions were
originally but products of a long, unbroken, unperverted constitutional
history; and certain that we shall preserve our institutions in their
integrity and efficiency only so long as we keep true in our practice
to the traditions from which our first strength was derived, there
is, nevertheless, little doubt that the forces peculiar to the new
civilization of our day, and not only these, but also the restless
forces of European democratic thought and anarchic turbulence brought
to us in such alarming volume by immigration, have deeply affected and
may deeply modify the forms and habits of our politics.
All vital governments--and by vital governments I mean those which have
life in their outlying members as well as life in their heads--all
systems in which self-government lives and retains its self-possession,
must be governments by neighbors, by peoples not only homogeneous, but
characterized within by the existence among their members of a quick
sympathy and an easy neighborly knowledge of each other. Not foreseeing
steam and electricity or the diffusion of news and knowledge which
we have witnessed, our fathers were right in thinking it impossible
for the government which they had founded to spread without strain or
break over the whole of the continent. Were not California now as near
neighbor to the Atlantic States as Massachusetts then was to New York,
national self-government on our present scale would assuredly hardly
be possible, or conceivable even. Modern science, scarcely less than
our pliancy and steadiness in political habit, may be said to have
created the United States of to-day.
Upon some aspects of this growth it is very pleasant to dwell, and very
profitable. It is significant of a strength which it is inspiring to
contemplate. The advantages of bigness accompanied by abounding life
are many and invaluable. It is impossible among us to hatch in a corner
any plot which will affect more than a corner. With life everywhere
throughout the continent, it is impossible to seize illicit power over
the whole people by seizing any central offices. To hold Washington
would be as useless to a usurper as to hold Duluth. Self-government
cannot be usurped.
A French writer has said that the autocratic ascendency of Andrew
Jackson illustrated anew the long-credited tendency of democracies to
give themselves over to one hero. The country is older now than it was
when Andrew Jackson delighted in his power, and few can believe that
it would again approve or applaud childish arrogance and ignorant
arbitrariness like his; but even in his case, striking and ominous as
it was, it must not be overlooked that he was suffered only to strain
the Constitution, not to break it. He held his office by orderly
election; he exercised its functions within the letter of the law;
he could silence not one word of hostile criticism; and, his second
term expired, he passed into private life as harmlessly as did James
Monroe. A nation that can quietly reabsorb a vast victorious army is
no more safely free and healthy than is a nation that could reabsorb
such a President as Andrew Jackson, sending him into seclusion at the
Hermitage to live without power, and die almost forgotten.
A huge, stalwart body politic like ours, with quick life in every
individual town and county, is apt, too, to have the strength of
variety of judgment. Thoughts which in one quarter kindle enthusiasm
may in another meet coolness or arouse antagonism. Events which are
fuel to the passions of one section may be but as a passing wind to
another section. No single moment of indiscretion, surely, can easily
betray the whole country at once. There will be entire populations
still cool, self-possessed, unaffected. Generous emotions sometimes
sweep whole peoples, but, happily, evil passions, sinister views,
base purposes, do not and cannot. Sedition cannot surge through the
hearts of a wakeful nation as patriotism can. In such organisms poisons
diffuse themselves slowly; only healthful life has unbroken course. The
sweep of agitations set afoot for purposes unfamiliar or uncongenial
to the customary popular thought is broken by a thousand obstacles.
It may be easy to reawaken old enthusiasms, but it must be infinitely
hard to create new ones, and impossible to surprise a whole people into
unpremeditated action.
It is well to give full weight to these great advantages of our big
and strenuous and yet familiar way of conducting affairs; but it is
imperative at the same time to make very plain the influences which are
pointing toward changes in our politics--changes which threaten loss of
organic wholeness and soundness. The union of strength with bigness
depends upon the maintenance of character, and it is just the character
of the nation which is being most deeply affected and modified by the
enormous immigration which, year after year, pours into the country
from Europe. Our own temperate blood, schooled to self-possession and
to the measured conduct of self-government, is receiving a constant
infusion and yearly experiencing a partial corruption of foreign blood.
Our own equable habits have been crossed with the feverish humors of
the restless Old World. We are unquestionably facing an ever-increasing
difficulty of self-command with ever-deteriorating materials, possibly
with degenerating fibre. We have so far succeeded in retaining
“Some sense of duty, something of a faith,
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
Some patient force to change them when we will,
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd;”
But we must reckon our power to continue to do so with a people made up
of “minds cast in every mould of race,--minds inheriting every bias of
environment, warped by the diverse histories of a score of different
nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded, by almost every climate
on the globe.”
What was true of our early circumstances is not true of our present. We
are not now simply carrying out under normal conditions the principles
and habits of English constitutional history. Our tasks of construction
are not done. We have not simply to conduct, but also to preserve and
freshly adjust our government. Europe has sent her habits to us, and
she has sent also her political philosophy, a philosophy which has
never been purged by the cold bath of practical politics. The communion
which we did not have at first with her heated and mistaken ambitions,
with her radical, speculative habit in politics, with her readiness
to experiment in forms of government, we may possibly have to enter
into now that we are receiving her populations. Not only printing and
steam and electricity have gotten hold of us to expand our English
civilization, but also those general, and yet to us alien, forces of
democracy of which mention has already been made; and these are apt to
tell disastrously upon our Saxon habits in government.
IV.
It is thus that we are brought to our fourth and last point. We have
noted (1) the general forces of democracy which have been sapping
old forms of government in all parts of the world; (2) the error of
supposing ourselves indebted to those forces for the creation of our
government, or in any way connected with them in our origins; and (3)
the effect they have nevertheless had upon us as parts of the general
influences of the age, as well as by reason of our vast immigration
from Europe. What, now, are the new problems which have been prepared
for our solution by reason of our growth and of the effects of
immigration? They may require as much political capacity for their
proper solution as any that confronted the architects of our government.
These problems are chiefly problems of organization and leadership.
Were the nation homogeneous, were it composed simply of later
generations of the same stock by which our institutions were planted,
few adjustments of the old machinery of our politics would, perhaps,
be necessary to meet the exigencies of growth. But every added element
of variety, particularly every added element of foreign variety,
complicates even the simpler questions of politics. The dangers
attending that variety which is heterogeneity in so vast an organism
as ours are, of course, the dangers of disintegration--nothing less;
and it is unwise to think these dangers remote and merely contingent
because they are not as yet very menacing. We are conscious of oneness
as a nation, of vitality, of strength, of progress; but are we often
conscious of common thought in the concrete things of national policy?
Does not our legislation wear the features of a vast conglomerate? Are
we conscious of any national leadership? Are we not, rather, dimly
aware of being pulled in a score of directions by a score of crossing
influences, a multitude of contending forces?
This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led; its giant
faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong
to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can
groups of communities. We speak of the sovereignty of the people, but
that sovereignty, we know very well, is of a peculiar sort; quite
unlike the sovereignty of a king or of a small, easily concerting
group of confident men. It is judicial merely, not creative. It
passes judgment or gives sanction, but it cannot direct or suggest.
It furnishes standards, not policies. Questions of government are
infinitely complex questions, and no multitude can of themselves
form clear-cut, comprehensive, consistent conclusions touching them.
Yet without such conclusions, without single and prompt purposes,
government cannot be carried on. Neither legislation nor administration
can be done at the ballot box. The people can only accept the
governing act of representatives. But the size of the modern democracy
necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the
shaping of popular judgments in a very different way from that in which
it was exercised in former times. “It is said by eminent censors of
the press,” said Mr. Bright on one occasion in the House of Commons,
“that this debate will yield about thirty hours of talk, and will end
in no result. I have observed that all great questions in this country
require thirty hours of talk many times repeated before they are
settled. There is much shower and much sunshine between the sowing of
the seed and the reaping of the harvest, but the harvest is generally
reaped after all.” So it must be in all self-governing nations of
to-day. They are not a single audience within sound of an orator’s
voice, but a thousand audiences. Their actions do not spring from a
single thrill of feeling, but from slow conclusions following upon much
talk. The talk must gradually percolate through the whole mass. It
cannot be sent straight through them so that they are electrified as
the pulse is stirred by the call of a trumpet. A score of platforms in
every neighborhood must ring with the insistent voice of controversy;
and for a few hundreds who hear what is said by the public speakers,
many thousands must read of the matter in the newspapers, discuss
it interjectionally at the breakfast-table, desultorily in the
street-cars, laconically on the streets, dogmatically at dinner; all
this with a certain advantage, of course. Through so many stages
of consideration passion cannot possibly hold out. It gets chilled
by over-exposure. It finds the modern popular state organized for
giving and hearing counsel in such a way that those who give it must
be careful that it is such counsel as will wear well. Those who
hear it handle and examine it enough to test its wearing qualities
to the utmost. All this, however, when looked at from another point
of view, but illustrates an infinite difficulty of achieving energy
and organization. There is a certain peril almost of disintegration
attending such phenomena.
Every one now knows familiarly enough how we accomplished the wide
aggregations of self-government characteristic of the modern time, how
we have articulated governments as vast and yet as whole as continents
like our own. The instrumentality has been representation, of which the
ancient world knew nothing, and lacking which it always lacked national
integration. Because of representation and the railroads to carry
representatives to distant capitals, we have been able to rear colossal
structures like the government of the United States as easily as the
ancients gave political organization to a city; and our great building
is as stout as was their little one.
But not until recently have we been able to see the full effects of
thus sending men to legislate for us at capitals distant the breadth
of a continent. It makes the leaders of our politics, many of them,
mere names to our consciousness instead of real persons whom we have
seen and heard, and whom we know. We have to accept rumors concerning
them, we have to know them through the variously colored accounts
of others; we can seldom test our impressions of their sincerity by
standing with them face to face. Here certainly the ancient pocket
republics had much the advantage of us: in them citizens and leaders
were always neighbors; they stood constantly in each other’s presence.
Every Athenian knew Themistocles’s manner, and gait, and address, and
felt directly the just influence of Aristides. No Athenian of a later
period needed to be told of the vanities and fopperies of Alcibiades,
any more than the elder generation needed to have described to them the
personality of Pericles.
Our separation from our leaders is the greater peril, because
democratic government more than any other needs organization in order
to escape disintegration; and it can have organization only by full
knowledge of its leaders and full confidence in them. Just because it
is a vast body to be persuaded, it must know its persuaders; in order
to be effective, it must always have choice of men who are impersonated
policies. Just because none but the finest mental batteries, with pure
metals and unadulterated acids, can send a current through so huge and
yet so rare a medium as democratic opinion, it is the more necessary
to look to the excellence of these instrumentalities. There is no
permanent place in democratic leadership except for him who “hath clean
hands and a pure heart.” If other men come temporarily into power among
us, it is because we cut our leadership up into so many small parts,
and do not subject any one man to the purifying influences of centred
responsibility. Never before was consistent leadership so necessary;
never before was it necessary to concert measures over areas so vast,
to adjust laws to so many interests, to make a compact and intelligible
unit out of so many fractions, to maintain a central and dominant force
where there are so many forces.
It is a noteworthy fact that the admiration for our institutions
which has during the past few years so suddenly grown to large
proportions among publicists abroad is almost all of it directed to
the restraints we have effected upon the action of government. Sir
Henry Maine thought our federal Constitution an admirable reservoir,
in which the mighty waters of democracy are held at rest, kept back
from free destructive course. Lord Rosebery has wondering praise for
the security of our Senate against usurpation of its functions by the
House of Representatives. Mr. Goldwin Smith supposes the saving act
of organization for a democracy to be the drafting and adoption of a
written constitution. Thus it is always the static, never the dynamic,
forces of our government which are praised. The greater part of our
foreign admirers find our success to consist in the achievement of
stable safeguards against hasty or retrogressive action; we are asked
to believe that we have succeeded because we have taken Sir Archibald
Alison’s advice, and have resisted the infection of revolution by
staying quite still.
But, after all, progress is motion, government is action. The waters
of democracy are useless in their reservoirs unless they may be used
to drive the wheels of policy and administration. Though we be the
most law-abiding and law-directed nation in the world, law has not
yet attained to such efficacy among us as to frame, or adjust, or
administer itself. It may restrain, but it cannot lead us; and I
believe that unless we concentrate legislative leadership--leadership,
that is, in progressive policy--unless we give leave to our nationality
and practice to it by such concentration, we shall sooner or later
suffer something like national paralysis in the face of emergencies. We
have no one in Congress who stands for the nation. Each man stands but
for his part of the nation; and so management and combination, which
may be effected in the dark, are given the place that should be held by
centred and responsible leadership, which would of necessity work in
the focus of the national gaze.
What is the valuable element in monarchy which causes men constantly
to turn to it as to an ideal form of government, could it but be kept
pure and wise? It is its cohesion, its readiness and power to act,
its abounding loyalty to certain concrete things, to certain visible
persons, its concerted organization, its perfect model of progressive
order. Democracy abounds with vitality; but how shall it combine with
its other elements of life and strength this power of the governments
that know their own minds and their own aims? We have not yet reached
the age when government may be made impersonal.
The only way in which we can preserve our nationality in its integrity
and its old-time originative force in the face of growth and imported
change is by concentrating it; by putting leaders forward, vested with
abundant authority in the conception and execution of policy. There is
plenty of the old vitality in our national character to tell, if we
will but give it leave. Give it leave, and it will the more impress and
mould those who come to us from abroad. I believe that we have not made
enough of leadership.
“A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one;
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.”
We shall not again have a true national life until we compact it by
such legislative leadership as other nations have. But once thus
compacted and embodied, our nationality is safe. An acute English
historical scholar has said that “the Americans of the United States
are a nation because they once obeyed a king;” we shall remain a nation
only by obeying leaders.
“Keep but the model safe,
New men will rise to study it.”
V
GOVERNMENT UNDER THE CONSTITUTION
It is by no means wholly to our advantage that our constitutional law
is contained in definitive written documents. The fact that it is thus
formulated and rendered fixed and definite has seriously misled us, it
is to be feared, as to the true function and efficacy of constitutional
law. That law is not made more valid by being written, but only more
explicit; it is not rendered more sacred, but only more definite and
secure. Written constitutions are simply more or less successful
generalizations of political experience. Their tone of authority does
not at all alter the historical realities and imperative practical
conditions of government. They determine forms, utter distinct
purposes, set the powers of the State in definite hierarchy; but they
do not make the forms they originate workable, or the purposes they
utter feasible. All that must depend upon the men who become governors
and upon the people over whom they are set in authority. Laws can have
no other life than that which is given them by the men who administer
and the men who obey them. Constitutional law affords no exception to
the rule. The Constitution of the United States, happily, was framed by
exceptional men thoroughly schooled in the realities of government. It
consists, accordingly, not of principles newly invented, to be put into
operation by means of devices originated for the occasion, but of sound
pieces of tested experience. It has served its purpose beneficently,
not because it was written, but because it has proved itself accordant
in every essential part with tried principles of government--principles
tested by the race for whose use it was intended, and therefore
already embedded in their lives and practices. Its strength will be
found, upon analysis, to lie in its definiteness and in its power to
restrain rather than in any unusual excellence of its energetic parts.
For the right operation of these it has had to depend, like other
constitutions, upon the virtue and discretion of the people and their
ministers. “The public powers are carefully defined; the mode in which
they are to be exercised is fixed; and the amplest securities are taken
that none of the more important constitutional arrangements shall be
altered without every guarantee of caution and every opportunity for
deliberation.... It would seem that, by a wise constitution, democracy
may be made nearly as calm as water in a great artificial reservoir.”[D]
[D] Sir Henry Maine: Popular Government (Am. ed.), pp. 110, 111.