thirteen colonies, now grown into thirty-eight States, besides eight
Territories, is the special interest of England in their condition and
prospects.
I do not speak of political controversies between them and us, which are
happily, as I trust, at an end. I do not speak of the vast contribution
which, from year to year, through the operations of a colossal trade,
each makes to the wealth and comfort of the other; nor of the friendly
controversy, which in its own place it might be well to raise, between
the leanings of America to Protectionism, and the more daring reliance
of the old country upon free and unrestricted intercourse with all the
world. Nor of the menace which, in the prospective development of her
resources, America offers to the commercial pre-eminence of England.[8]
On this subject I will only say that it is she alone who, at a coming
time, can, and probably will, wrest from us that commercial primacy. We
have no title, I have no inclination, to murmur at the prospect. If she
acquires it, she will make the acquisition by the right of the
strongest; but, in this instance, the strongest means the best. She
will probably become what we are now, the head servant in the great
household of the world, the employer of all employed; because her
service will be the most and ablest. We have no more title against her,
than Venice, or Genoa, or Holland has had against us. One great duty is
entailed upon us, which we, unfortunately, neglect: the duty of
preparing, by a resolute and sturdy effort, to reduce our public
burdens, in preparation for a day when we shall probably have less
capacity than we have now to bear them.
Passing by all these subjects, with their varied attractions, I come to
another, which lies within the tranquil domain of political philosophy.
The students of the future, in this department, will have much to say in
the way of comparison between American and British institutions. The
relationship between these two is unique in history. It is always
interesting to trace and to compare Constitutions, as it is to compare
languages; especially in such instances as those of the Greek States and
the Italian Republics, or the diversified forms of the feudal system in
the different countries of Europe. But there is no parallel in all the
records of the world to the case of that prolific British mother, who
has sent forth her innumerable children over all the earth to be the
founders of half-a-dozen empires. She, with her progeny, may almost
claim to constitute a kind of Universal Church in politics. But, among
these children, there is one whose place in the world's eye and in
history is superlative: it is the American Republic. She is the eldest
born. She has, taking the capacity of her land into view as well as its
mere measurement, a natural base for the greatest continuous empire ever
established by man. And it may be well here to mention what has not
always been sufficiently observed, that the distinction between
continuous empire, and empire severed and dispersed over sea, is vital.
The development, which the Republic has effected, has been unexampled in
its rapidity and force. While other countries have doubled, or at most
trebled, their population, she has risen, during one single century of
freedom, in round numbers, from two millions to forty-five. As to
riches, it is reasonable to establish, from the decennial stages of the
progress thus far achieved, a series for the future; and, reckoning upon
this basis, I suppose that the very next census, in the year 1880, will
exhibit her to the world as certainly the wealthiest of all the nations.
The huge figure of a thousand millions sterling, which may be taken
roundly as the annual income of the United Kingdom, has been reached at
a surprising rate; a rate which may perhaps be best expressed by saying,
that if we could have started forty or fifty years ago from zero, at the
rate of our recent annual increment, we should now have reached our
present position. But while we have been advancing with this portentous
rapidity, America is passing us by as if in a canter. Yet even now the
work of searching the soil and the bowels of the territory, and opening
out her enterprise throughout its vast expanse, is in its infancy. The
England and the America of the present are probably the two strongest
nations of the world. But there can hardly be a doubt, as between the
America and the England of the future, that the daughter, at some no
very distant time, will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably
yet stronger than the mother.
"O matre forti filia fortior."[9]
But all this pompous detail of material triumphs, whether for the one
or for the other, is worse than idle, unless the men of the two
countries shall remain, or shall become, greater than the mere things
that they produce, and shall know how to regard those things simply as
tools and materials for the attainments of the highest purposes of their
being. Ascending, then, from the ground-floor of material industry
toward the regions in which these purposes are to be wrought out, it is
for each nation to consider how far its institutions have reached a
state in which they can contribute their maximum to the store of human
happiness and excellence. And for the political student all over the
world, it will be beyond any thing curious as well as useful to examine
with what diversities, as well as what resemblances, of apparatus the
two greater branches of a race born to command have been minded, or
induced, or constrained to work out, in their sea-severed seats, their
political destinies according to the respective laws appointed for them.
No higher ambition can find vent in a paper such as this, than to
suggest the position and claims of the subject, and slightly to indicate
a few outlines, or, at least, fragments, of the working material.
In many and the most fundamental respects the two still carry in
undiminished, perhaps in increasing, clearness, the notes of resemblance
that beseem a parent and a child.
Both wish for self-government; and, however grave the drawbacks under
which in one or both it exists, the two have, among the great nations of
the world, made the most effectual advances toward the true aim of
rational politics.
They are similarly associated in their fixed idea that the force, in
which all government takes effect, is to be constantly backed, and, as
it were, illuminated, by thought in speech and writing. The ruler of St.
Paul's time "bare the sword" (Rom. xiii: 4). Bare, it as the Apostle
says, with a mission to do right; but he says nothing of any duty, or
any custom, to show by reason that he was doing right. Our two
governments, whatsoever they do, have to give reasons for it; not
reasons which will convince the unreasonable, but reasons which on the
whole will convince the average mind, and carry it unitedly forward in a
course of action, often, though not always, wise, and carrying within
itself provisions, where it is unwise, for the correction of its own
unwisdom before it grow into an intolerable rankness. They are
governments, not of force only, but of persuasion.
Many more are the concords, and not less vital than these, of the two
nations, as expressed in their institutions. They alike prefer the
practical to the abstract. They tolerate opinion, with only a reserve on
behalf of decency; and they desire to confine coercion to the province
of action, and to leave thought, as such, entirely free. They set a high
value on liberty for its own sake. They desire to give full scope to the
principle of self-reliance in the people, and they deem self-help to be
immeasurably superior to help in any other form; to be the only help, in
short, which ought not to be continually, or periodically, put upon its
trial, and required to make good its title. They mistrust and mislike
the centralization of power; and they cherish municipal, local, even
parochial liberties, as nursery grounds, not only for the production
here and there of able men, but for the general training of public
virtue and independent spirit. They regard publicity as the vital air of
politics; through which alone, in its freest circulation, opinions can
be thrown into common stock for the good of all, and the balance of
relative rights and claims can be habitually and peaceably adjusted. It
would be difficult in the case of any other pair of nations, to present
an assemblage of traits at once so common and so distinctive, as has
been given in this probably imperfect enumeration.
There were, however, the strongest reasons why America could not grow
into a reflection or repetition of England. Passing from a narrow island
to a continent almost without bounds, the colonists at once and vitally
altered their conditions of thought as well as of existence, in relation
to the most important and most operative of all social facts, the
possession of the soil. In England, inequality lies embedded in the very
base of the social structure; in America it is a late, incidental,
unrecognized product, not of tradition, but of industry and wealth, as
they advance with various and, of necessity, unequal steps. Heredity,
seated as an idea in the heart's core of Englishmen, and sustaining far
more than it is sustained by those of our institutions which express it,
was as truly absent from the intellectual and moral store, with which
the colonists traversed the Atlantic, as if it had been some forgotten
article in the bills of lading that made up their cargoes. Equality
combined with liberty, and renewable at each descent from one
generation to another, like a lease with stipulated breaks, was the
groundwork of their social creed. In vain was it sought, by arrangements
such as those connected with the name of Baltimore or of Penn, to
qualify the action of those overpowering forces which so determined the
case. Slavery itself, strange as it now may seem, failed to impair the
theory however it may have imported into the practice a hideous
solecism. No hardier republicanism was generated in New England than in
the Slave States of the South, which produced so many of the great
statesmen of America.
It may be said that the North, and not the South, had the larger number
of colonists; and was the centre of those commanding moral influences
which gave to the country as a whole its political and moral atmosphere.
The type and form of manhood for America was supplied neither by the
Recusant in Maryland, nor by the Cavalier in Virginia, but by the
Puritan of New England; and it would have been a form and type widely
different could the colonization have taken place a couple of centuries,
or a single century, sooner. Neither the Tudor, nor even the Plantagenet
period, could have supplied its special form. The Reformation was a
cardinal factor in its production; and this in more ways than one.
Before that great epoch, the political forces of the country were
represented on the whole by the monarch on one side, and the people on
the other. In the people, setting aside the latent vein of Lollardism,
there was a general homogeneity with respect to all that concerned the
relation of governors and governed. In the deposition of sovereigns, the
resistance to abuses, the establishment of institutions for the defence
of liberty, there were no two parties to divide the land. But, with the
Reformation, a new dualism was sensibly developed among us. Not a
dualism so violent as to break up the national unity, but yet one so
marked and substantial, that thenceforward it was very difficult for any
individual or body of men to represent the entire English character, and
the old balance of its forces. The wrench which severed the Church and
people from the Roman obedience left for domestic settlement thereafter
a tremendous internal question, between the historical and the new,
which in its milder form perplexes us to this day. Except during the
short reign of Edward VI, the civil power, in various methods and
degrees, took what may be termed the traditionary side, and favored the
development of the historical more than the individual aspect of the
national religion. These elements confronted one another during the
reigns of the earlier Stuarts, not only with obstinacy but with
fierceness. There had grown up with the Tudors, from a variety of
causes, a great exaggeration of the idea of royal power; and this
arrived, under James I and Charles I, at a rank maturity. Not less, but
even more masculine and determined, was the converse development. Mr.
Hallam saw, and has said, that at the outbreak of the Great Rebellion,
the old British Constitution was in danger, not from one party but from
both. In that mixed fabric had once been harmonized the ideas, both of
religious duty, and of allegiance as related to it, which were now held
in severance. The hardiest and dominating portion of the American
colonists represented that severance in its extremest form, and had
dropped out of the order of the ideas, which they carried across the
water, all those elements of political Anglicism, which give to
aristocracy in this country a position only second in strength to that
of freedom. State and Church alike had frowned upon them; and their
strong reaction was a reaction of their entire nature, alike of the
spiritual and the secular man. All that was democratic in the policy of
England, and all that was Protestant in her religion, they carried with
them, in pronounced and exclusive forms, to a soil and a scene
singularly suited for their growth.
It is to the honor of the British Monarchy that, upon the whole, it
frankly recognized the facts, and did not pedantically endeavor to
constrain by artificial and alien limitations the growth of the infant
states. It is a thing to be remembered that the accusations of the
colonies in 1776 were entirely levelled at the king actually on the
throne, and that a general acquittal was thus given by them to every
preceding reign. Their infancy had been upon the whole what their
manhood was to be, self-governed and republican. Their Revolution, as we
call it, was like ours in the main, a vindication of liberties inherited
and possessed. It was a Conservative revolution; and the happy result
was that, notwithstanding the sharpness of the collision with the
mother-country, and with domestic loyalism, the Thirteen Colonies made
provision for their future in conformity, as to all that determined
life and manners with the recollections of their past. The two
Constitutions of the two countries express indeed rather the differences
than the resemblances of the nations. The one is a thing grown, the
other a thing made; the one a _praxis_, the other a _poiesis_: the one
the offspring of tendency and indeterminate time, the other of choice
and of an epoch. But, as the British Constitution is the most subtle
organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of
progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so-far as I can
see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the
brain and purpose of man. It has had a century of trial, under the
pressure of exigencies caused by an expansion unexampled in point of
rapidity and range: and its exemption from formal change, though not
entire, has certainly proved the sagacity of the constructors, and the
stubborn strength of the fabric.
One whose life has been greatly absorbed in working, with others, the
institutions of his own country, has not had the opportunities necessary
for the careful and searching scrutiny of institutions elsewhere. I
should feel, in looking at those of America, like one who attempts to
scan the stars with the naked eye. My notices can only be few, faint,
and superficial; they are but an introduction to what I have to say of
the land of my birth. A few sentences will dispose of them.
America, whose attitude toward England has always been masculine and
real, has no longer to anticipate at our hands the frivolous and
offensive criticisms which were once in vogue among us. But neither
nation prefers (and it would be an ill sign if either did prefer) the
institutions of the other; and we certainly do not contemplate the great
Republic in the spirit of mere optimism. We see that it has a marvellous
and unexampled adaptation for its peculiar vocation; that it must be
judged, not in the abstract, but under the fore-ordered laws of its
existence; that it has purged away the blot with which we brought it
into the world; that it gravely and vigorously grapples with the problem
of making a continent into a state; and that it treasures with fondness
the traditions of British antiquity, which are in truth unconditionally
its own, as well, and as much as they are ours. The thing that perhaps
chiefly puzzles the inhabitants of the old country is why the American
people should permit their entire existence to be continually disturbed
by the business of the Presidential elections; and, still more, why they
should raise to its maximum the intensity of this perturbation by
providing, as we are told, for what is termed a clean sweep of the
entire civil service, in all its ranks and departments, on each
accession of a chief magistrate. We do not perceive why this arrangement
is more rational than would be a corresponding usage in this country on
each change of Ministry. Our practice is as different as possible. We
limit to a few scores of persons the removals and appointments on these
occasions; although our Ministries seem to us, not unfrequently, to be
more sharply severed from one another in principle and tendency than are
the successive Presidents of the great Union.
It would be out of place to discuss in this article occasional phenomena
of local corruption in the United States, by which the nation at large
can hardly be touched: or the mysterious manipulations of votes for the
Presidency, which are now understood to be under examination; or the
very curious influences which are shaping the politics of the negroes
and of the South. These last are corollaries to the great
slave-question: and it seems very possible that after a few years we may
see most of the laborers, both in the Southern States and in England,
actively addicted to the political support of that section of their
countrymen who to the last had resisted their emancipation.
But if there be those in this country who think that American democracy
means public levity and intemperance, or a lack of skill and sagacity in
politics, or the absence of self-command and self-denial, let them bear
in mind a few of the most salient and recent facts of history which may
profitably be recommended to their reflections. We emancipated a million
of negroes by peaceful legislation; America liberated four or five
millions by a bloody civil war: yet the industry and exports of the
Southern States are maintained, while those of our negro colonies have
dwindled; the South enjoys all its franchises, but we have, _proh
pudor!_ found no better method of providing for peace and order in
Jamaica, the chief of our islands, than by the hard and vulgar, even
where needful, expedient of abolishing entirely its representative
institutions.
The Civil War compelled the States, both North and South, to train and
embody a million and a half of men, and to present to view the greatest,
instead of the smallest, armed forces in the world. Here there was
supposed to arise a double danger. First, that on a sudden cessation of
the war, military life and habits could not be shaken off, and, having
become rudely and widely predominant, would bias the country toward an
aggressive policy, or, still worse, would find vent in predatory or
revolutionary operations. Secondly, that a military caste would grow up
with its habits of exclusiveness and command, and would influence the
tone of politics in a direction adverse to republican freedom. But both
apprehensions proved to be wholly imaginary. The innumerable soldiery
was at once dissolved. Cincinnatus, no longer an unique example, became
the commonplace of every day, the type and mould of a nation. The whole
enormous mass quietly resumed the habits of social life. The generals of
yesterday were the editors, the secretaries, and the solicitors of
to-day. The just jealousy of the State gave life to the now forgotten
maxim of Judge Blackstone, who denounced as perilous the erection of a
separate profession of arms in a free country. The standing army,
expanded by the heat of civil contest to gigantic dimensions, settled
down again into the framework of a miniature with the returning
temperature of civil life, and became a power wellnigh invisible, from
its minuteness, amidst the powers which sway the movements of a society
exceeding forty millions.
More remarkable still was the financial sequel to the great conflict.
The internal taxation for Federal purposes, which before its
commencement had been unknown, was raised, in obedience to an exigency
of life and death, so as to exceed every present and every past example.
It pursued and worried all the transactions of life. The interest of the
American debt grew to be the highest in the world, and the capital
touched five hundred and sixty millions sterling. Here was provided for
the faith and patience of the people a touchstone of extreme severity.
In England, at the close of the great French war, the propertied
classes, who were supreme in Parliament, at once rebelled against the
Tory Government, and refused to prolong the income tax even for a single
year. We talked big, both then and now, about the payment of our
national debt; but sixty-three years have since elapsed, all of them
except two called years of peace, and we have reduced the huge total by
about one ninth; that is to say, by little over one hundred millions, or
scarcely more than one million and a half a year. This is the conduct of
a State elaborately digested into orders and degrees, famed for wisdom
and forethought, and consolidated by a long experience. But America
continued long to bear, on her unaccustomed and still smarting
shoulders, the burden of the war taxation. In twelve years she has
reduced her debt by one hundred and fifty-eight millions sterling, or at
the rate of thirteen millions for every year. In each twelve months she
has done what we did in eight years; her self-command, self-denial, and
wise forethought for the future have been, to say the least, eightfold
ours. These are facts which redound greatly to her honor; and the
historian will record with surprise that an enfranchised nation
tolerated burdens which in this country a selected class, possessed of
the representation, did not dare to face, and that the most unmitigated
democracy known to the annals of the world resolutely reduced at its own
cost prospective liabilities of the State, which the aristocratic, and
plutocratic, and monarchical government of the United Kingdom has been
contented ignobly to hand over to posterity. And such facts should be
told out. It is our fashion so to tell them, against as well as for
ourselves; and the record of them may some day be among the means of
stirring us up to a policy more worthy of the name and fame of England.
It is true, indeed, that we lie under some heavy and, I fear, increasing
disadvantages, which amount almost to disabilities. Not, however, any
disadvantage respecting power, as power is commonly understood. But,
while America has a nearly homogeneous country, and an admirable
division of political labor between the States individually and the
Federal Government, we are, in public affairs, an overcharged and
overweighted people.[10]